You're So Spoiled!
by Kiski
Summary: An actually good version of the traditional 'One week at my house, one week at yours' jive assignment. Why? Because it was his fault in the first place. KaibaxOC Be warned: They're not going to be playing nice. /M: Sexual Content; Intense Situations.
1. Chapter 1

_**Note:** Oh mah. This is my wonderful interpretation of those millions of awful fanfictions that are about 'he stayd ta her house and tehy had passonate sxe!' Why? 'B/c... uh... the sensee gave tehm a assignmnt.' So, here's my version of that._

_But better. So much better. I'm going to make this work. And I'm going to make it HOT. _

_Edit: Oh God, she's rude. I love her so. Hahaha..._

_**Summary:** An actually good version of the traditional 'One week at my house, one week at yours' jive assignment. Why? Because it was his fault in the first place. KaibaxOC (Be warned: They're not going to be playing nice.)_

_**Warning:** Probable sensuality, innuendos, and sexual tension. Oh, and psychopathic hatred._

_Edit: And crudity. Lots and lots of crudity._

_**Disclaimer: **I didn't kill Gozaburo. Kazuki Takahashi did._

_You're So Spoiled!_

_Chapter One_

Seto Kaiba, as a rule, wasn't a fan of people. However, nothing could quite compare to the incomprehensible loathing that had built up between the two of them.

From the instant he saw her, charging in late with legs flying and papers clutched between her teeth, he had been struck by inexplicable disgust. She was crass, loud, rude and opinionated. Her uniform had been mended in some places with bright red darning wool, and she couldn't seem to control her wild masses of hair.

But worst of all, she talked back.

It had been instantaneous. He had shot down her idealistic humanitarian speech on how post-secondary education should be free and gifted students government-sponsored beyond necessity, and she given him the sharpest tongue-lashing of his life. And worse, unlike Jonouchi's explosions, it had made sense. Since then, every class had become a war, the desks between them a verbal no man's land, and all the other students had begun to- quite sensibly- say nothing for fear of articulated murder. She was infuriating.

And today, she was worse then ever.

"Kaiba-_san_," she cooed with mock respect, "When was the last time you had to worry about having your favourite pants soaked through with blood because you a few cents short of a box of tampons?"

He suppressed an unprofessional shudder, fiercely resisting anything that would give her ammunition. All the young men in the class were beginning to look rather ill- even the steadfastly iron-stomached Jonouchi looked as though he were contemplating escape. He cleared his throat and gave her a slatey glare.

"Never, but before you continue on your feminist tangent," he bit out, "I find it rather unlikely that every month you'd be however many _yen_," _'God, she's American. Cents?'_ he thought, "short of a 'box of tampons'. You're blowing this out of proportion."

She rolled her eyes in exasperation, the light of the fluorescents casting a shine across the lenses of her glasses. "Alright, then. Have it your way." She stood, inciting a bitter protest from the teacher, who had been attempting to cool the situation for the past ten minutes. "Girls," she said, looking around. "How many of _you_ haven't been able to afford a box of tampons or pads at the end of the month, or, even, how many of you think that, yes, they are a necessity, and they shouldn't be taxed?" Almost every female hand in the class went up, albeit hesitantly, with apologetic glances towards the brunette; Even some of the cheekier male ones went up. Some of the bolder girls put up both. She looked at him defiantly. "Kaiba-san, they're a necessity. More so then condoms, maybe even more so then groceries- if you don't think so, maybe I'll come over and bleed all over your floor, since you seem to think that's acceptable."

He nearly retched at the idea. "You're being juvenile," he told her coldly. "That was a highly uncouth and unnecessary statement." She laughed.

"Sweetheart," she said, anger bringing out the American purr of her accent, "let me tell you something. People have sex without condoms every day, and they're fine, yet that's an untaxed item. People eat at restaurants, which are taxed, and there's no different in the food they eat there and the food they make themselves, except for effort and service. Every woman on this planet, barring a very small minority, menstruates. It's very messy, it's highly unsanitary, and it's uncontrollable without the use of either pads or tampons. To me, that makes those items qualify on the same level of importance as first aid items." She gave him a cool stare from behind her wire-frames. "Don't you agree?"

He sputtered mentally for a moment, but his silence was just long enough for her to know she'd won, and she smirked and sat down. "Hence," she said, "they should be untaxed. Case closed."

He sulked. "You are so inconceivably arrogant."

She laughed unkindly. "Who are you to talk? You wouldn't last a day in my shoes. I work for every ounce of this ego," she said cockily. He rolled his eyes skyward in disgust.

The teacher found this an extremely apt moment to wreak his revenge and resume control. "That's an excellent idea, Nauswell-san," he said quickly. "A person's lifestyle can have a great amount of influence on their interpretation of the law. I do believe this is a great opportunity for a law assignment."

Nauswell looked slightly confused, but he caught onto the teacher's meaning at once, and quickly decided he didn't like it very much. "No," he snapped. "I refuse to spend time with _that_."

Anger and comprehension dawned on her pale face. "Ugh! I second that," she said, looking distinctly revolted. "Besides, he'd die from attention deprivation," came the snipe. He glowered at her.

"On the other hand..." the brunet grated out, wishing he could wipe that cocky smirk off her face with a solid slap, "I do think Nauswell-san and I need some _quality time_ together." The 'eww, gross!' expression on her face was almost worth it.

She made false gagging noises. "Maybe if he could control his wild passion for me," she told the teacher. "That's the source of all this ruckus." The girl sent him a little smirk. "Isn't it cute? He's finally hitting puberty!" The other students giggled nervously, looking vaguely terrified.

The teacher sputtered, burying small, chubby hands in his hair. "Well, you'd each have to be paired with someone of the same sex-" he began, but the brunet cut him off sharply.

"No. Only _her_." His cold, malicious glare brooked no argument.

_She_ snickered, and spoke up.

"Besides, what're you afraid of? That we're going to have sex or something?"

She loudly began to pretend to throw up on the dusty brown tiling.

The glare he sent her could've curdled milk. _'I'm going to break that girl's neck.'_

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

Lounging on her slightly scruffy couch, Jennifer Nauswell began to feel slightly sick, the adrenaline of the afternoon wearing off.

"_Your house first," he told her. "I think the strain of adopting both my lifestyle and my company all at once might give someone as simple as you a stroke."_

She rolled her eyes, feeling unexpectedly worse. He really was a spoiled little bitch, she thought. And now, she only had the rest of this _wonderful_- as in completely overcast and depressing- Friday afternoon left of freedom. _'And then the wonderfully exuberant company of world's biggest asshole. I swear, the reason he's so tall is because he's had to grow to accommodate the enormous stick up his ass.'_ She snickered, thinking of him using it as a pogo stick, and cast a broody eye over her very humble apartment.

It was tiny- in all, the whole thing was two rooms. There was a bathroom, a closet, which really didn't count at all, and this room. This room, which contained her very small bed, her very scruffy couch, her very second-hand television, and her very clean, but very outdated, kitchen appliances.

She sighed, feeling a slight twinge of self-consciousness. Joints popping as she rose, she began to tidy up the contents of her impromptu coffee table- which also doubled as her dinner table, her study desk, and beyond- removing some of the less tasteful magazines and wondering why she was. _'It's to deprive him of material to mock me with,'_ she told herself. Her subconscious nagged her doubtfully. She beat it down, feeling upset and embarrassed already. _'And he's not even here yet!'_ The idea of him having any control of her angered her, and she threw the magazines back down on the table.

Her fingers began to itch, and she groaned. _"Fuck,"_ she growled, and straightened everything, her hands flying with the cold familiarity of the obsessive compulsive. Over the next two hours, she literally washed the entire inside her apartment, scrubbing strains out of the old, dust-coloured carpeting, touching up trim, wiping down the insides on appliances, the tops of counters, and disinfecting doorhandles. If someone had been there to observe her, they would've been struck by the familiarity of her actions- it was almost as though strenuous obsessive cleaning was hard-wired into her system.

Unfortunately, by the time she was done, he fingers ached, her hands were painfully dry, on the verge of cracking and bleeding, and the apartment only looked marginally better. After all, she thought dourly, there was no fountain of youth for furniture. Old things stay old... except in Hollywood. She smiled privately at the thought, then frowned, aware of how dirty and sweaty she herself had become. Wrinkling her nose, she stripped off and climbed into her newly clean shower.

The mirror began to fog almost at once, and her skin immediately reddened from the scalding heat, but she sighed in relief, muscles unknitting.

Ten minutes later, she was asleep, naked, on the floor of the shower, the water still running.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_


	2. Chapter 2

_**Note:**__ I know it's been a ridiculous amount of time since I've updated this- around seven months, actually- but I'm going to give it another shot, because I really do like the concept of this story._

_Edit: The use of the word 'cum' is not what your sick mind is thinking- the original meaning of the word is the spoken equivalent of 'slash' (/)._

_Double-Edit: I realize not a whole lot happens here, but it's a set-up- there has to be some, you know._

_**Summary:**__ An actually good version of the traditional 'One week at my house, one week at yours' jive assignment. Why? Because it was his fault in the first place. KaibaxOC (Be warned: They're not going to be playing nice.)_

_**Warning:**__ Probable sensuality, innuendos, and sexual tension. Oh, and psychopathic hatred._ _And crudity. Lots and lots of crudity._

_**Disclaimer: **__I didn't kill Gozaburo. Kazuki Takahashi did._

_You're So Spoiled!_

_Chapter Two_

When Seto Kaiba woke up on Saturday morning, his first thoughts were mostly preoccupied with work- something in the programming of his new gaming system was muddling the basic functions and causing a ridiculous amount of system errors, and he needed to work out what before his development team finished their first game prototype.

These were regular thoughts; relaxing thoughts. Mediocre but essential work he had all but mastered many years ago. Saturday morning was a quiet, relaxing morning; Mokuba liked to sleep in on weekends, a habit he endorsed for the sake of a few hours of peace.

It wasn't until he was sitting at the breakfast table, on his third cup of coffee, even thinking for once that maybe he would make himself something, that he finally recalled.

He wasn't a person to forget things; he never forgot things. Later, when he reflected, he would come to decide that it was a simple, completely wilful desire not to know that lead to this ever-unusual occurance.

But because of this, the shattering blow to his relaxed state was that much more devastating. He instantly felt the lost headache of the past week begin to build in his temples, and whilst he didn't realize it, the muscles in his shoulders instantly began to tense and knot.

It was a crime, he thought, swearing quietly under his breath, losing his appetite. He wasn't going to be able to get anything done cooped up in some little rathole of an apartment, distracted by the smells of strange cooking and unwashed dishes and, more than likely, perfumy scent of aerosol sprays and scented candles or, heaven forbid, perfume itself. The more he examined the possibilities of it, the more likely it seemed, and he began to quietly despair. Because even assuming there would be no strange and prepossessing smells, he would be with _her_, and he knew she would delight in obstructing anything productive he would attempt. It was hopeless.

The section of his mind always calculating began to total up the lost work of the next two weeks, and it came down to this:

He would have to assume that no significant amount of work could be done at _her _apartment, so the first week was a total loss of production. Furthermore, he would have to assume his productivity with be obstructed by making sure her obvious destructive tendencies were kept in check, so it was implied that the second week would have highly impaired productivity. He began to calculate where that would put his newest console compared to game development- assuming his staff couldn't work out the bug- and began to panic in earnest.

It couldn't be done. He would be at least- at the absolute very least- a month behind in production and opening, meaning his console wouldn't be released on the publicly promised deadline. If the console prototype wasn't at least functioning by the next coming weekend, the gaming staff obviously couldn't program the essential base sections required for the console to port it.

He jammed his hands in his hair, beginning to grind his teeth unconsciously. His head was pounding. What had he been thinking? No.

What had _she_ been thinking, starting that impossible ruckus?

His thoughts began to darken with wrathful intent. There were always ways to make _certain_ of a little quiet work time, weren't there?

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

The instant Jennifer Nauswell woke up, she remembered her unpleasant guest. The instant after that, she remembered that she had fallen asleep, naked, on the floor of her shower, and then she began to swear in earnest. Her skin made a disgusting sound as she peeled herself from the suction of the tiling.

She could hear her joints complaining as they popped and snapped when she tried to rise. Massaging her limp, sodden limbs to life, she muttered profanities under her breath, and stared up at the still-streaming showerhead, wondering how it could possibly be worth it to heave her evidently damaged lower limbs under her to turn off the water.

She did it anyway, speeded by her lack of knowledge of the time. As she tottered out into her tiny bedroom-cum-kitchen-cum-living room, wrapped in a towel with her hair plastered strangely to her face and still smelling of bathroom cleaner, she eyed the microwave's little informative screen. Six-thirty-five on the twenty-four hour clock. She sighed a little in relief. No normal teenager would dream of being up at this point on a Saturday.

Of course, she thought, sobering a mite, the illustrious Seto Kaiba was no average teenager. She deliberated in her tiny living space, feeling muddled and self-conscious, and then dismissed the thought. Even if he was up at this point, even he couldn't be so inconsiderate- or so eager, rather, she thought dryly- to show up so early. She began to towel off, feeling the tickling feelers of water running down her thighs.

One positive point of her impromptu 'nap' was that her bed was still impeccably made, she thought, amused. She tossed the towel down on her rather scruffy couch, and began to root through her drawers for something to appropriately cover her still-damp body. She'd made it as far as underwear, jeans and a bra when a stern knock on the door made her jump.

She glanced over at the microwave again. It was only seven. What was this? Pulling on a t-shirt and hastily combing her still-wet hair back with her fingers, she paced towards the door. It couldn't be. Not this early. "Hello?"

"Are you going to open this door, or should I take your hesitation as a sign of your obvious fear?"

Her blood boiled. It _was_. Fumbling with the locks and yanking the door open, she glowered up at him, and gave him a mockingly inviting bow. However, instead of reacting, he eyed her curiously. "What?" she snapped.

His expression was interested, but his cautious eyes betrayed nothing. "You're not wearing your glasses."

She realized suddenly why her balance seemed so off- a fact she'd been blaming on restless, uncomfortable sleep and sodden, numb limbs. She'd left her glasses on her bathroom counter before her shower the night before. She swore inaudibly and tottered off to get them. Snatching them off the counter, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror.

There was a large, offensive red mark on her cheek, imprinted roughly in the shape of her tiling, and her hastily combed back hair was soaking the collar of her shirt. She stopped for a moment. _'And all he noticed was that I'm not wearing my glasses?'_ She felt vaguely insulted, and carelessly shoved her glasses over her ears. She could hear him taking off what were indubitably fancy dress shoes, probably worth more than most of the contents of her _('Closet, it's a closet')_ apartment.

He was looking around speculatively when she exited the bathroom, rubbing the raised ridges on her cheek unconsciously. He turned to her with a sceptical expression, and for the very first time in a very long time, she felt acutely uncomfortable.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

"It's a dump," Seto Kaiba told his odd, volatile host. She blinked at him with eyes he had only just realized were a delicate shade of jade. He smirked internally at that still-fresh image of her at the door, thick dark hair dripping down her front, bare eyes wild with anger. He had been right; showing up early would infuriate her, and though it didn't help with his ever-mounting headache, it did gave him a deep-seated sense of sadistic satisfaction.

She fish-mouthed for a couple moments before taking in an audibly angry, shuddering breath. "I'm sorry it's not to your taste," she ground out, and stomped- _'She's rather badly co-ordinated,'_ he thought- over to the kitchen without turning to him again. "Would you like something?"

He snorted a little at her rather admirable- not that he'd admit it aloud- attempts to be civil whilst he invaded her personal space. "What are you offering?" he asked quietly from directly behind her, approaching her softly and leaning over her. She stiffened, and before he could so much as laugh, she'd whirled around and planted her palm directly in the centre of his chest, shoving him backwards.

"We'll be having none of that," she said sharply, glowering at him. He re-evaluated his assessment of her. _'Not unco-ordinated- just ungraceful.' _

"You have a problem with personal space in a home this small?" he shot at her. She glowered over her shoulder at him as she rooted through the cupboards.

"I've got water, milk, or cider," she said, producing two chipped but undeniably clean glasses. He blinked for a moment before opening his mouth. "I don't drink coffee," she cut in without looking at him. He blanched inwardly.

This was going to be a very interesting stay.

_'Or at least an explosive one.'_

_(You're So Spoiled!)_


	3. Chapter 3

_**Note:**__ This is for you, Doesn't Matter. You asked, I delivered, just because I love you for taking the time to go and read my other works and review. _

_Yeah, so, it's been a million years or so since I updated. _

_I'm so sorry. Please don't kill me._

_This appears to be going the way of White Alice- dark and menacing, but I swear, it's not that bad. There's an explanation for all of this, and it's nothing terribly tragic, don't worry._

_**Summary:**__ An actually good version of the traditional 'One week at my house, one week at yours' jive assignment. Why? Because it was his fault in the first place. KaibaxOC (Be warned: They're not going to be playing nice.)_

_**Warning:**__ Probable sensuality, innuendos, and sexual tension. Oh, and psychopathic hatred._ _And crudity. Lots and lots of crudity._

_**Disclaimer: **__I didn't kill Gozaburo. Kazuki Takahashi did._

_**You're So Spoiled!**_

_**Chapter Three**_

It had taken her all of ten minutes to pour a full cup of cider over his head. Given her apparently frugal approach to everything but soap usage, he considered that an achievement.

Unfortunately, it meant he needed to bathe again, because both the stickiness and the heady smell of the cider were aggravating his throbbing skull. He took a moment away from furiously scrubbing the last of the stickiness from his hair to regard the tiles of the shower floor with fond amusement. _'Ah,'_ he thought. _'Those look familiar.'_

The size of the shower made him do a double-take. Alone, he was cramped, having bend slightly at the knees to accommodate the low showerhead, and unable to spread his elbows outwards as his hands quested through his hair. "She lay down in here?" he muttered. The floor space didn't seem big enough to sit on comfortably, let alone fall asleep. _'Exhaustion? But from what?'_

He found himself genuinely curious for the first time, and as he towelled off and dressed, he listened. The apartment was disconcertingly silent. Exiting the bathroom, he found the couch- _'Futon, apparently'_- opened and dressed with green sheets, an old pillow and a plaid comforter, and Nauswell on her bed, sitting hunched over a mediocre laptop. The floor space had been reduced from cramped to miniscule by the change.

He watched his temporary roommate quietly for a moment. She really was an odd creature, cross-legged and slouching without concern, and in the light of the early morning, her dark hair took on an almost reddish glow, revealing itself to be dark brown, not black like he'd assumed. After a moment, she rolled her shoulders in a circle and arched her back, grimacing without taking her eyes off of the screen or her hands off the keyboard.

"You're going to destroy your spine," he told her seriously. She looked up contemptuously.

"Your hair is wet," she replied with utmost seriousness.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

She wasn't sure why it she'd said that, only that his damp hair was sticking out at the left temple in a way she'd never seen before. _'Cowlick, he's got a cowlick,'_ she thought dreamily. A bead of water was running down his neck, and it left a small dark mark on the starched collar of his shirt. Her first thought after that was _'Why is he wearing a dress shirt __**here**__?' _Her second just amounted to a vaguely confused and self-conscious _'God, he has really nice skin.' _She could feel her face heating up inexplicably, and slouched further behind her computer.

Huddled down as she was, she couldn't see his face, but she could hear the amusement in his voice so clearly she could see the expression in her mind nonetheless. "Yes, it's wet. That's what happens with water, you know. And cider, incidentally." He paused, and even in the pause she could feel his contempt. "Did you not take that into account when you made the particularly _stellar_ decision to soil me?"

"I took your _mom_ into account," she said childishly. Out of habit, she began to scoot backwards into the corner and push the covers on her bed into a small wall around her like she'd done when she lived at home. "Brothers," she said. There was a moment of silence.

"What?" he asked, sounding confused for the first time, and then grumpy. "I didn't ask."

"Douche," she muttered, and returned to her homework.

There was about five minutes of complete silence before his typing joined her own. She stole a quick, envious glance at the beautiful machine he was using. _'Ahh,'_ she thought, _'A quad-core laptop. Looks custom built. Liquid crystal, by the looks of it. God, I bet he's got one hell of a graphics chip.'_ The thought was almost sexual in intensity. She had sudden surge of _want_, and kept stealing surreptitious, petulant looks at the sleek silver machine. She felt an unexplainable urge to apologize to her own subpar contraption for her infidelity.

The amusement was back. "Admiring the view?" She ignored the implication in favour of honesty.

"It's a beautiful machine," she said quietly. She couldn't quite keep the wistfulness out of her voice, so she pushed her computer screen more upright to hide her expression.

Now he sounded surprised. "You like computers?" She was proud to note that it had a small measure of respect in it. "I wouldn't have guessed, given your personality." Or not.

She grimaced at the backhanded compliment. "I don't know a whole lot about them, just bits here and there." It wasn't quite a lie. She wasn't an expert, for sure, but she definitely took a more pronounced interest than she was letting on. He accepted the non-truth with insulting ease.

"I built this," he told her. She couldn't miss the arrogance, and she didn't think he'd intended her to.

_'Of course you did,'_ she wanted to snap, but restrained herself. Despite his conceit, she was impressed and humbled, and it was making her distinctly grumpy. All she said was "I have work to do."

They didn't speak to each other for the rest of the evening. Even time in the bathroom was divided civilly in silence, as though they had been working around each other's presence for weeks, maybe months.

It was strange, but she couldn't help but be grateful. However, she still felt it was the social equivalent of the calm before the storm.

_'Let it come,' _she thought. _'And we'll see who can push harder.'_

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

In the evening, she found that he'd fallen asleep long before she'd finished cleaning and taming herself to her standards. That surprised her. He slept with his back to the wall, which didn't. She spared a moment to look at him with a critical eye. With his eyes closed and his lips softened into a less imposing line, he looked almost normal. Exceptionally attractive, with such striking, angular features, she had to admit, but without the disconcertingly light grey-blue of his eyes against the dark brown of his eyelashes, he looked more beautiful. _'It's like all the sensuality and passion leaves him while sleeps,'_ she thought, and then snorted quietly at the poetic thought. _'Because Kaiba is definitely a poetic creature.'_ She almost laughed.

Sparing one last glance at her rather exceptional guest, she walked, as silently as possible, into the small kitchenette, and reached down under the sink with fond familiarity.

Jennifer Nauswell made absolutely certain the bottle of sleeping pills didn't rattle as she dislodged them from behind the pipes.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

When he awoke the next day, he knew exactly where he was.

The strange thing was that he didn't feel upset at the prospect at all. He wanted to attribute it to the fact that she had evidently been awed into silence by his technological prowess the day before, but he had to admit, albeit privately, that it was because he had slept extraordinarily well and was feeling quite patient and capable as a result. He'd also gotten a promising amount of work done the night before.

She was still sleeping, a fact that he didn't find remarkable. She seemed like the sort who would sleep in as late as possible given the chance. _'Like Jonouchi, that useless piece of trash.' _The depth of her sleep did seem unusual, though, given that direct sunlight was playing across her face and chest. Amused, he stopped briefly to look at her on the way to the kitchenette.

He frowned. There was something odd about her hair where it was pulled back. Leaning over slightly to get a better look, he blocked the light over her eyelids. Her deep, steady breathing didn't even hitch. He frowned. _'Unusual.'_ He had suspicions, and carefully placed two fingers below her eyes. She didn't move. _'Very unusual.'_ He stretched the skin slightly, pulling them open. Her pupils were massively dilated, but even when he moved to allow the light to hit her, she didn't awaken.

He was disturbed. _'Jesus,'_ he thought, and took a quick glance around. They wouldn't be anywhere obvious, he knew that much. And not submerged under water, he was sure, so not the back of the toilet. _'Maybe a light fixture or loose panel? No, too difficult to put back after.' _His eye fell on the sink. _'Ah. I wonder?'_

Sure enough, a few moments groping brought smooth roundness to his fingers. Prescription roundness, he saw, and not prescribed to her. He looked at it thoughtfully for a moment, and then stashed it in his briefcase. He dressed in the main room. It wasn't as though he needed to be concerned about her waking up, he thought.

It wasn't until at least an hour and a half later that she did wake up, and she awoke to find him, immaculately dressed, watching her with a quiet, blank expression. "What time is it?" she asked him, and he marvelled at her coherence. Short scraps of hair were sticking out of her braid in loosened whorls, and they picked up the light.

"Eleven," he told her. It was a soft tone of voice that should have been nice to listen to, but he could see her stiffen a little. He just looked at her thoughtfully in response. "I am no longer surprised by your lack of household stimulants," he told her simply. He then picked up his briefcase and left without a word.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

They were _gone._

She fought back panic. _'His stuff is still here, he's coming back, don't worry,'_ she told herself, and then proceeded to tear through it. The bottle wasn't there, not among the carefully pressed and folded shirts and rolled socks, nor the small bag of expensive toiletries. _'It's fine,'_ she insisted, _'I don't need it until tonight anyway, it's doesn't matter.'_ She pressed a hand to her chest and tried to think rationally. _'I can always coax another one out of Atsuko, if I have to.'_ She bit her lip at the thought. That would take time, which was something she wasn't sure she could handle.

Falling asleep in the shower had been remarkable in ways that weren't entirely good. The prospect of not being able to control her own sleep patterns was one she wasn't entirely comfortable with. The prospect of not being able to control her own emotions was what brought her back down to her usual fierce discipline. She put back Kaiba's belongings as exactly as she could painstakingly manage, even taking time to carefully position the zippers how she recalled them.

"The first day," she muttered, busying herself with preparing breakfast. "The first day, and he catches on." She eyed the pan thoughtfully, and cracked another egg. _'It couldn't hurt to get on his good side. I need all the leverage I can get.'_ Jennifer knew her cooking abilities were less than spectacular, but she supposed her new roommate would have to be content. _'Or make his own damn food.'_ She set the burner to low, and wandered over to the bathroom.

_'I'll have to be content with what I __**can**__ do now,'_ she thought. Rationality was her personal pride, and with it, she wrested the last of her fluttering panic under control. It would be alright, she told herself firmly. If he didn't give them back, discomfort would ensue, but that was temporary. If he told someone, he would lose his leverage over her, so she found that unlikely. If it happened, she'd be put in counselling. She had dealt with counsellors before.

What she could do was improve her personal influence, and she did so by first completing her morning ritual. Toothbrush, hairbrush, face cloth, all neatly in their places, the lineup of appliances mirroring the necessary application. It was familiar, and calming. When she completed her _(Purging, it's purging)_ morning cleansing, she turned thoughtfully to the small black case she kept on the counter out of habit. _'After breakfast?'_

She combed her fingers through her hair thoughtfully.

_'It certainly couldn't hurt.'_

_(You're So Spoiled!)_


	4. Chapter 4

_**Note:**__ Alright, so it's official. I'm dedicating this work of fiction to Doesn't Matter. It's extremely rare that I continue something after a hiatus of over a month, let alone a year. Your reviews always leave me feeling incredibly flattered and motivated, and it means a lot to me. So here it is, just for you, since you seem to inspire that in me. _

_Also, da-da-da, TENSION. Because that's what this has become. Insane amounts of inter-house tension by being a massive goofball. Do you know where?_

_Also, at one point in this, I break this tension of the narrative completely. Can you guess where?_

_Edit: Sorry for the wait, Jesus. Here it is!_

_**Summary:**__ An actually good version of the traditional 'One week at my house, one week at yours' jive assignment. Why? Because it was his fault in the first place. KaibaxOC (Be warned: They're not going to be playing nice.)_

_**Warning:**__ Probable sensuality, innuendos, and sexual tension. Oh, and psychopathic hatred._

_Edit: And crudity. Lots and lots of crudity._

_**Disclaimer: **__I didn't kill Gozaburo. Kazuki Takahashi did._

_You're So Spoiled!_

_Chapter Four_

He had thought about selfishly purchasing coffee for his own purposes, but it felt wrong. Because he'd confiscated her pills, he felt as though there was a balance he needed to maintain.

_'This is idiotic,'_ he thought. _'There is no balance to this situation. This woman is depraved.'_

Regardless, he was still shouldering two large bags of high-quality food. It was more than they would need for the week, he knew, but he had noticed the pointed bareness of her fridge, and had suspicions about that, too.

He was beginning to suspect that on a whole, Jennifer Nauswell was not as put together a person as she strove to appear. He hadn't failed to notice the unusually precise and static placement of her furniture, either, and that itself added to his growing comprehension of her character.

When he walked into the apartment, the futon had been returned to couch form, and his blanket, sheets and pillow were neatly folded on the arm. _'Ah.'_ He could smell food. _'Eggs?'_

He stopped when he saw her. It had been strange enough, seeing her without her glasses the day before, but the way she looked then had nothing on the uncanny sensation she was invoking at that moment.

She was very neatly put together, which wasn't unusual, but she was wearing a short, neatly pressed, white lace dress. She was also wearing makeup. Her hair was smooth, not frizzy. Her glasses were nowhere to be seen. He noticed, in an abstract sort of way, that the nails on her bare feet were painted the same soft coral colour as the ones on her fingers.

She looked sweet, soft, and normal. He was immediately on guard. _'Ah.'_ He frowned at her. _'I understand.'_ He walked in as normal, removed his shoes, and brought the food to the kitchen. "My contribution to your household," he told her formally, and bowed. He smiled and bowed in return. He could see the soft blue lace of her bra between her breasts. _'Shit.'_

She laced her fingers together in front of her. "I made food. You're welcome to some."

He looked uneasy at the covered pot on the stove. It smelled edible enough, but her change in disposition and the likely motivation of it made him worry. He looked back at her. "The combination for my suitcase is not something easy guessed," he told her. She looked amused.

"That's nice."

The way she was smiling at him, the newly-wed wife expression and posture she'd adopted, made him hopeful and tense at the same time. On one hand, it could very well mean she was prepared to offer him something he would be proud to call a conquest in this particular battle. He was also shamefully curious if that soft lace bra was the only thing she was wearing that was blue.

On the other hand, if her intention was to distract him from a more sinister approach, she was doing it more successfully than he liked.

_'I really can't do anything but eat it,'_ he thought uneasily. _'I am her guest.'_

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

Jennifer Nauswell was delighted.

Her unwanted house guest was reacting in a much more entertaining manner than she'd anticipated. She'd wanted to laugh when his eyes flickered downwards, and at the tightness of his jaw as he'd looked back and forth between her and her perfectly innocent fried eggs and vegetables.

He was eating now, but obviously uncomfortable enough that he wasn't enjoying a single bite.

It delighted her endlessly.

_'I fucking __**own**__ you,'_ she thought fiercely. _'This is my home, and in it I will not be trifled with.'_ A little part of her expressed concern about her visit to his esteemed place of living. She told it that she would handle it when it came in six days.

Sitting across from him, she continued to smile as sweetly as she could, smoothing her dress over her knees with her thin hands. She brought her gaze down to her fingers, demurely, and up to his face, coquettishly. He paused in his chewing, sending her a disturbed look. "Are you content with what you have eaten?" she asked, unable to keep the sing-song of mischief from her voice. He gave her a hard nod, and pushed the bowl away with more haste than she thought he would have liked to betray.

_'Like a book,' _she thought impishly, _'an open book. So obvious.' _She picked up his bowl and brought it t the kitchen. Soup, hot water, cloth, she soothed. A familiar routine amid the joys of her amusement.

She felt him behind her before she had time to turn. His hands pressed in, one on her waist, the other on her shoulder, holding her to the counter firmly. Her breath sent a wisp of her hair skittering across her cheek. "What are you doing?" It was a quiet question, but full of menace.

She wanted to face him, to continue to unnerve him with her imitation of wholesome innocence, but she was caught by the fact that his hand was carefully exploring the curve of her shoulder and neck. She could feel his thumb, stroking slowly downwards over the lumps of her vertebrae, and the lightly callused pads of his fingers working their way along her collarbone. It felt distractingly sensuous. _'He has big hands,' _she thought, and then, '_Shit.'_ She bit the inside of her cheek, aware that she had missed her window. _'It appears I'm not the only one resorting to underhanded tactics.'_

She turned her head to give him a stony glare, and discovered his face, close by hers, with an expression of cold interest. The pale grey-blue irises of his eyes looked like shattered glass up close, held in by that thin, striking ring of dark grey. She was caught, and realized too late that she had let herself look frightened. He smiled at her. She kept her expression neutral.

She could smell his cologne, mingled with the fresh eggs smell of his breath as he spoke. "I asked you a question," he said, and tilted his head up imperiously. She could see up his nose. "I don't think you're suited to this kind of scheming, Nauswell."

The smell of him was choking her. She was glad for the egg, in reality; combined with those piercing blue eyes, that soft-spicy scent that was Seto Kaiba was making her lose her composure. A sick, wistful part of her wondered if the smell of his sweat would have that pleasingly sensual smell. Another, sicker, more petulant part wondered what those eyes would look like if they were backlit by her ceiling light. _'Fuck. I've got to stop this.'_

She slapped him.

She hadn't meant to, but when she'd jerked away, his hand, set on the back of her waist, had slipped down. From then, it had been reactionary. She expected him to react violently, but instead, he quietly released her, brought a hand to his cheek gingerly, and smirked.

For the first time in her life, Jennifer Nauswell was lost. _'I don't even know what the game is anymore.' _

"You are so unbelievably strange," she told him, a little bit awestruck.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

In the short time it had been available, he had grown very fond of her mousy, frightened expression.

If it was psychological warfare she wanted, he was more than willing to provide, he thought, and smiled at her again. It seemed to unnerve her, and he was graced with another gratifying flicker of that uncertain fear.

It was an oddly perfect role-reversal, he thought, him staring her down while she did her own work. Her eyes kept flickering up from her laptop and then sliding back down surreptitiously. It hurt him to watch for exactly one reason: He knew he'd been doing that, in his own discomfort, just minutes before.

_'Today… is going by much too slowly,'_ he thought, feeling suddenly very weary. Looking at her for long periods of time was making him notice things about her, and while that was good, they were pointless, inane things, like the fact that she had a duo of small dark freckles to the side of her left eye. Or the fact that her dress was riding up and he could see a sliver of her dark underwear. _'Christ. I have to get out of here.'_

He examined her again. There had to be something he could or say that would not further betray his motivations. What she knew know was only that he had taken possession of her pills and was storing them in his suitcase. That was fine, he thought. That was harmless enough.

A thought struck him.

Leaning over to pick it up off of the ground, he watched her out of the corner of his eye. _'Ah.'_ He had her full attention.

She was unexpectedly tense, her hands holding her laptop off of her lap in expectation, her shoulders rolled forward with intent. He smirked at her. She snarled at him.

"That's very unladylike," he told her.

"I'll leave the lady things to you, then," she replied.

He frowned, and set the suitcase back down. Nauswell looked stricken with loss, and slumped back against the wall. Her hair haloed outwards with static from the humidity. He picked the suitcase back up. She glowered at him in what he could only assume was futile rage. "Given up pretending not to care, have you?" he asked her carefully.

All she said was "Give them to me." He sighed.

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Nauswell." He stood and bowed politely. "I have some errands to run. Excuse me." As he was slipping on his shoes, he heard her moving. He looked up uneasily. "What are you doing?"

Jennifer Nauswell continued to strap on her sandals.

"Obviously, I'm coming with you."

_(W/A)_


	5. Chapter 5

_**Note**__: I live._

_This chapter may be confusing, as it contains French, implications of English, and a little Welsh, but remember: "…" in italics means speech in another language. '…' in italics means thought. _

_**Summary:**__ An actually good version of the traditional 'One week at my house, one week at yours' jive assignment. Why? Because it was his fault in the first place. KaibaxOC (Be warned: They're not going to be playing nice.)_

_**Warning:**__ Probable sensuality, innuendos, and sexual tension. Oh, and psychopathic hatred._ _And crudity. Lots and lots of crudity._

_**Disclaimer: **__I didn't kill Gozaburo. Kazuki Takahashi did._

_You're So Spoiled!_

_Chapter Five_

She was stealing covertly lustful glances at his suitcase again.

He resisted the urge to tuck it under his arm. She emanated a depraved and palpable _want_ that threatened him more than any business competitor ever had. "I did tell you that the combination is not easily guessed, Nauswell," he snapped at her, dropping all politeness in his irritation and startling an innocently shopping couple nearby.

Jennifer Nauswell gave him an unnerving look of wide-eyed, closed-mouth excitement. He tucked his briefcase under his arm. "It's made of lightweight carbon-based polymer, reinforced with a flexible grid of titanium alloy," he muttered to her narrow, contemplative look. "Anything you tried that worked would destroy the bottle."

She crossed her arms, looking suddenly sulky. "You fucking rich folk suck. Give a girl a chance, would you?" She turned away to stare forward stonily, and the profile of her sulking lips was uncomfortably appealing – beyond just the satisfaction of depressing her. He looked away, towards the bright yellow sign of the 'New Releases!' section.

"Not giving drug addicts the option of breaking into a briefcase usually containing millions of dollars of information, and, occasionally, the newest prototypical imaging technology, not to mention my personal effects… well, that seemed fairly common sense to me when I designed it." Her eyes widened imperceptibly and he smirked. "If there were any weaknesses in my design, I'd know. This has stopped bullets," he said, caressing the handle fondly. The couple was looking at them and whispering. He glared at them.

She glowered at him for a moment, but suddenly smiled sweetly. "I'm not an addict, asshole. And there is always a weakness in your design," she said, casting another lustful glance towards the discreet silver locks by his on either side of his fingers.

Seto Kaiba snorted, and leaned his head towards her. "I suppose you won't need to get into my case at all, then," he purred, and cast her a sly sideways look. "And please, enlighten me."

"Why are we here, anyway?" She whined without answering, scuffing her sandals on the linoleum. "I'd think that you'd have everything you could possibly need from an electronics store, considering." He smiled narrowly at her visible envy.

"You'd be correct in thinking that. I'm checking to make sure Kaiba Corporation's shipment came in. Our contracted service has been unsatisfactory in the past month." He sent her another sideways look, interested at her absolute refusal to look back. "Are you going to apprise me of this masterfully devised flaw in my design?"

"_Hubris_," she said malevolently, glowering up at him. "_Et tu, Brut__é__."_

Kaiba raised his eyebrows and chuckled quietly, thoroughly entertained.

"Shakespeare, hm?" He said, smiling at her. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the couple chattering excitedly and fishing for their cellphones. "So it's me, and I'm arrogant and deceitful, am I?"

"_Oui, mon ami_," she said, looking up at him with her rich, baleful eyes. He could see the edges of her contacts in the white fluorescent light. "_J'aime ton faiblesse. Votre faiblesse m'excite_."

He considered her thoughtfully. _'I love your weakess, she says. Your weakness excites me, she says,'_ he thought, amused. "Ah… _en Français, Mademoiselle Jennifer?_" He chuckled at her look. "_Mon faiblesse n'est pas ce qui vous excite, est-il?_"

She sent him a scathing look. "_There's very little about you that excites me,_" she said fluidly in English. "_You should be grateful for what does._"

He kept his face arranged in an expression of amused disinterest, but his curiousity was piqued. _'Fluent in French, English and Japanese, and an apparently rampant abuser of easily accessible depressants. I wonder what else you're hiding?'_ He looked down his nose at her impassively and retorted in like. "_Even if exciting you was anywhere in my interest, it seems I'd have more luck with restricted pharmaceuticals than demonstrations of psychological fallibility._"

She pulled her lips back from her teeth like an animal and clenched her arms to her sides. Kaiba suspected she was resisting the urge to strike him in public. She stared at him silently for a few moments, and he left off browsing the shelves for his merchandise to stare back.

"_Yr wyf am i chi wthio i lawr a mi gael rhyw gyda mi,_" she snarled suddenly, looking furious. He resisted staring, marveling that what she was speaking seemed to be an actual language. "_Ac yr wyf yn ei casineb. Pam ydych chi'n cyffroi i mi fel hyn?_" she demanded. She watched him with a look of frank and serious consideration for long enough that he wondered if she was finished speaking. She wasn't. "_Fe allech chi ladd mi heb gyffwrdd fi,_ Seto Kaiba."

He smirked. "I see." She snorted and gave him an infuriatingly satisfied and knowing look.

"I know you don't understand Welsh. Don't pretend you do."

He dropped his smirk. "Explain what you just said to me, Nauswell."

She smiled slyly. "I'll say it again for you any time you like. _Yr wyf yn awyddus i gael rhyw gyda chi. Gallech fy lladd trwy beidio cyffwrdd mi._"

She wore her smugness like a gunslinger's hat. "That's not the same as what you said before," he observed, and she chuckled.

"_Mae ystyr yr un fath_. The meaning is the same."

He understood that she had repeated herself in Japanese for his benefit.

It made him furious.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

She couldn't help but feel an uncontrollable smugness over her linguistic victory, but her own hastiness and vanity were quickly getting the better of her.

Walking was making Jennifer's already short dress was work its way up, revealing more and more of her thighs. She tried to fix it discreetly, and caught her taller companion's look of dark pleasure. "Did you want to go back?" he asked, his bright eyes narrowed and challenging.

"I'm fine," she said, doing her best to sound cheerful and unconcerned. Truthfully, the fact that her underwear only really covered what was necessary did concern her. '_The last thing I need is Kaiba mocking my bare ass,'_ she thought, disgusted with herself. _'I didn't expect to be leaving the apartment. Though, reflecting, I'm probably lucky that Kaiba just finds me annoying.'_ She looked down at her tiny lace dress and laughed aloud.

She could feel the heat of his inquisitive look. Glancing over, his eyes were shadowed by their dark lashes, looking down at the bottom of her dress. She hitched it down again nervously. A chuckle rumbled out of his suited chest. She felt the last of her smugness drain into irritation and embarrassment. _'He's messing with me.'_

"Are you sure you don't want to head back?"

She glowered. "I'm fine." His lips were curled up in an unquestionably pleased expression of superiority. She looked enviously at his neatly pressed, high-collared suit. _'No more than a few inches of skin showing,'_ she thought angrily.

Her brain suddenly thrust forth the image of him standing in her apartment without a suit jacket, looking down at her imperiously as a dribble of moisture from his hair disappeared under that starched collar. _'That skin_,'she thought, and looked down, feeling light-headed.

She realized he had leaned close when she felt his breath on her hair. "Those people think we're a couple," he said quietly, and she looked up. They were being watched.

_'He __**is**__ distinctive,'_ she thought grumpily. "So what?"

His hand was cold. She looked over at her own, dwarfed and childlike, and pulled feebly, confused. "What…?" Her dress was slipping up. She tried desperately to correct it with one hand. _'Son of a __**bitch**_._'_ She looked at him. He smiled at her with a degree of sweetness and sincerity that confirmed her suspicions.

"You shouldn't fidget so much. People will think you're strange."He accompanied this innocent assertion with a forbidding motion.

He pulled her hand, in his own, towards his face.

Jennifer realized immediately that this would not have been a problem if he were not significantly taller than she was. As he was, the direction her arm was pulled was _up_.

As her arm went up, so did her dress. She grabbed it desperately, dropping all pretense of subtly, and began a wild and futile fight against his strong grip. He just looked at her and smiled. "You're making a scene," he murmured, and leaned his face against her hand in a way that would have seemed like totally normal from and to anyone else had it not been accompanied by such an inscrutably malicious look.

She could feel the soft skin of his lips against her middle pinky fingers, feel his hot breath tickle her knuckles, and remembered vividly the spicy scent of his cologne. Her brain shut down. _'Shit,'_ she thought, staring up and pulling down, listening to the excited whispers of onlookers. "You're going to end up in a tabloid," she said stupidly, desperately looking skywards. _'Asshole or not, you're offensively gorgeous,'_ she thought vaguely, grinding her teeth to keep herself grounded. _'I am very offended by you.'_

She had time to laugh at herself before he let her hand go. Jennifer grabbed the hem of her dress.

"We're going back," he said, already walking away, hands in his pockets.

She stared after him, puzzled.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

After their outing, she'd immediately shut herself in the bathroom. The shower had been running for nearly an hour. _'Did she pass out again?'_ He wondered. The water shut off. _'Ah.'_

He watched the door patiently as it opened a crack and she peeked out at him. _'Oh. I see. She's avoiding me?'_ He continued watching intently, amused and unashamed. "Did you need something?"

He heard her sigh echo in the bathroom. "I didn't bring my pajamas in with me."

He waited patiently before answering. "And?"

"Can you… get them for me?"

He smiled at her. "Why don't you get them yourself?"

The door shut. He surprised himself by laughing. He stopped laughing when she came out in a towel. "You need bigger towels," he told her immediately without thinking. "Is this something common to cheap towels?"

Jennifer Nauswell glared at him, scarlet-faced and shuffling quickly across the floor to her dresser, presumably because her putting one foot more than a matter of inches in front of the other would expose what little her pale yellow towel was covering. She grabbed a lump of clothing stiffly and shut herself in the bathroom again.

He rested his chin in his hand, trying not to contemplate the aesthetically pleasing angle her thighs made just inches below where they met.

He stopped watching the bathroom door.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

She wasn't sure what had inspired their unspoken agreement to pretend the other didn't exist, but it had been working perfectly well. Sunday night he slept and she dozed lightly. Monday and Tuesday, they had gone to school and ignored each other so well that their mutual classmates were beginning to discuss possession and possible lobotomies.

After three nights of no real sleep, she couldn't take it.

She was staring at him while he slept, willing him to murmur, to snore, to communicate in some way the code to his briefcase, instead of lying still and beautiful like a cursed princess. It was four in the morning, and feeble rays of light were starting to play through the blinds on his hair. She moved closer, examining in detail the cruel, dispassionate flatness of his parted lips, which naturally turned neither up nor down.

She had given up on not looking at him. After three sleepless nights, she had nothing better to do.

His mouth was a sensuous thing on its own, as pleasing to her in a strictly mathematical sense for its efficient design as it was for its other potential purposes. He had a wide mouth, with a reserved, neat cupid's bow and a pleasantly plush but firm-looking lower lip. Her overall impression was of total, perfect symmetry, and the urge to explore his face with her fingers grew stronger the more light-headed and deranged lack of sleep made her. She snatched back her hand again, only half-aware of her own intentions.

"Fuck," she swore loudly, too distracted to care. She took to examining her own hands, a habit she had developed before she had discovered someone in Tokyo willing to sell her pharmaceuticals. She hadn't been able to contact Atsuko; not with Kaiba there.

She had scrapes on her fingers from a madness that culminated in her wrestling, silent and furious, with Kaiba's briefcase. Her nails were getting long, but were torn from nervous biting. She looked at them angrily. Even her hands were reminders of him.

When she looked up again, he was looking back at her. "Shit!" she gasped, and scooted backwards. He just watched her, and then sat up.

"So you really don't sleep."

She looked away from his bright eyes, up to his softly tousled hair, illuminated by the early light. It was long light, casting shadows across his face. The shadows brought her back to those harsh, intent eyes, and she looked away again anxiously. "Yeah."

His fingers brushed and held her jaw, demanding her attention, but exploratory in a way she sympathized with. She looked up again. He was watching her expectantly, inscrutably. She wasn't sure what he was expecting.

He slept in short sleeves. The skin on his arm was beautiful. She ran her fingers along it, awestruck by the faint and somehow profound suggestion of green-blue she could see, delighted by the short, pale hairs that glistened and become visible in the early light. Beyond thinking, she pulled it to her face and ghosted her lips against his inner wrist, like a child still exploring the world with its mouth. His skin was warm, which surprised her for reasons she couldn't explain. She leaned her cheek against it and closed her eyes.

The apartment was so quiet that the shuffle of feet a floor below was what brought her back to her senses. She dropped her hands into her lap and looked away, mortified. She could hear him chuckling under his breath. "So this is what you're like when you're drunk."

She tried to glare at him, but her eyes shied away from his blindingly symmetrical face. "Nngh. Yeah. I don't know, maybe."

His hand pulled her jaw, a silent demand she face him. "What does '_fe allek…" _he struggled._ "ki lath mi heb gyfwrth fi'_ mean?"

"Good memory. _Gyffwrdd,"_ she corrected. "_Chi. Allech. Ladd. Fe allech chi ladd mi heb gyffwrdd fi, _Seto Kaiba." She laughed. "It means 'You could kill me without touching me'. " Her eyes skittered away. Again. She silently begged the empty air that he wouldn't ask about the rest.

"Will you tell me the rest?"

She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out his beautiful, inquisitive face. It didn't ask. It told. The simple parts of her brain still functioning clamoured to comply. "I want-" she started, and then laughed, trying to twist her face away again. " 'And I hate it.' _Ac yr wyf yn ei casineb_ means 'And I hate it.' " She laughed again, nervous and desperately clinging to the slippery reason why she didn't want to explain herself. "_Pam ydych chi'n cyffroi i mi fel hyn?_ That means… 'Why do you excite me like this?' "

She realized suddenly that she had said too much, and buried her face in her hands. His fingers pulled insistently at her wrists, demanding.

"And the first one? 'I want…' what do you want, Nauswell? Tell me. "

"I want you to…" she trailed off, staring through her fingers at his sharp, interested eyes. She had a moment of total clarity. _'He's getting his fingers in me, prying me open.'_ She sagged, and let herself slide sideways towards the floor. Only his hand closing on her arm stopped her from hitting the carpet.

"Tell me." Soft, coaxing. Addictively smooth and inviting, dangerous like aged scotch. She _wanted_ with a strength that stunned her. "Tell me, Jennifer."

She looked up at that. His mouth, that perfect, cruel, calculating, mathematical mouth, formed its way around her name like a mantra or a spell. She wondered vaguely what it would be like to be praised, to be rewarded, by that mouth. "Jennifer." Her name, an invocation.

_'Rumpelstiltskin,'_ she thought, and yanked.

"I'm going to bed," she said, and passed out on the floor.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_


	6. Chapter 6

_**Note**__: This gets really intense sometimes._

_The 'Little Boy' is the codename of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. (For those of you who play Fallout 3, the 'Fat Man' was the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.)_

_Edit: Ephedrine, amphetamine salts, methylphenidate, caffeine, dextromethamphetamine, nicotine, __methylenedioxymethamphetamine, cocaine, __norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake inhibitor__, modafinil, ampakine, tryptamine: _

_What a pretty language this is._

_I had never realized there were so many ways for a person to burn their brain irrevocably. _

_Second Edit: This chapter's pretty tame._

_**Summary:**__ An actually good version of the traditional 'One week at my house, one week at yours' jive assignment. Why? Because it was his fault in the first place. KaibaxOC (Be warned: They're not going to be playing nice.)_

_**Warning:**__ Probable sensuality, innuendos, and sexual tension. Oh, and psychopathic hatred._ _And crudity. Lots and lots of crudity._

_**Disclaimer: **__I didn't kill Gozaburo. Kazuki Takahashi did._

_You're So Spoiled!_

_Chapter Six_

Waking up was a frightening experience for Jennifer Nauswell, because falling asleep naturally was a thing she was largely unfamiliar with.

She awoke on her bed, alone in the apartment, with only a hazy and creeping suspicion of what had happened the night before. _'Like being drunk without drinking,'_ she thought, and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She knew that her unwanted- _'overwanted'_ her brain contested- roommate had put her in bed, and her skin boiled and itched at the idea of him touching her, lifting her vulnerable unconscious empty self in his arms. It terrified her.

She had an impression of the night before almost burnt into the back of her eyes- a repeating sequence of images and sensations, of running her hands and mouth across a soft, warm and infinitely beautiful rich paleness, and looking up to see Seto Kaiba's face, staring down at her with burning intensity, the pressure of his fingers on her jaw, pulling her up, his mouth calling her name like a command.

She buried her head in her heads. _'He didn't even touch me anywhere other than my face, and that was the most intensely sexual experience I've had since coming to Domino. Jesus.'_ She sighed. _'I have to admit, I must be the slow one. I expected a war with days spent huddling in trenches slinging rifle rounds at each other and giving and taking inches of territory. He laughed at that, brooked no competition, and is gearing up to drop the Little Boy on me at the first sign of my poking out of my hole.'_ She frowned, chewing her nails unconsciously. "It's Thursday," she said aloud in wonder.

The microwave's clock said that it was noon. She looked over. Her alarm clock had been disabled. Numbly, she looked towards the door, and then down. There was a white slip of paper on the table.

She reached for it.

_Nauswell,_ it read, no pleasantries or questions. _Nauswell, I have disabled your alarm and informed the teachers of your illness. I expect your attendance tomorrow to dissuade the staff of my committing an act of violence against you. _

There was a space below so typical of his judged, deliberate speaking style that she almost screamed at the paper.

_You will be explaining yourself to me. Be prepared._

_Kaiba, Seto_

She put the paper back down, and her eyes drifted back to the clock. _'Two and a half hours until school ends,'_ she thought dizzily, and made up her mind. _'I'll leave for a while, let him cool down. Come back late.'_

She hated to admit that he frightened her, but those parting words, so concisely Kaiba, "_You will be explaining yourself to me_. _Be prepared."_ almost audible in that quiet room, made her anxious to be anywhere that he was not. She considered her time-frame, and headed for the shower.

It was fairly simple, she thought, forcing herself to calm down. She had two hours to clean herself up, eat, and settle on a destination and what to bring. She intended to leave a half-hour before he'd get home, and to stay out of the apartment for at least five hours after that. She scrubbed her scalp thoughtfully, feeling the soft lather of her shampoo course down her naked back. _'I'll need a book, a handheld game system, maybe my laptop. Enough to keep me occupied.'_ She had a sudden thought. _'I could call Atsuko. I'll have to find a better hiding spot.'_

She dried and dressed leisurely, brushed and braided, shined her glasses clean. She set up a pot of rice on the stove and chopped Kaiba's very fine vegetables and laid out Kaiba's futon in the vague and futile hope that he'd fall asleep before she returned. She began packing a bag, arranging a box lunch, and fished out her cellphone from under her bed.

The microwave clock flashed _13:34_. The alarm clock glowed _13:35_, a few seconds ahead. Her cellphone glowed _14:34,_ and she looked at it in blank wonder.

_'Cellphones can't be time-set, can they?'_

The door to her apartment rattled and opened. She looked over. Seto Kaiba looked at her, and then at her bag, with an expression of overwhelming amusement. He raised an eyebrow. "So I was correct in believing you'd try to avoid me."

Jennifer Nauswell looked at him.

"I fucking hate you," she told him clearly.

He smiled, and locked the door behind him. She watched him take off his shoes with a slow easiness that sent her stomach plummeting. _'He expected this. Everything, as according to plan.'_ She looked at him again as he set his bag by the futon. "You fucking son of a bitch," she said, feeling blank and awestruck.

He handed her a stack of papers. "Your homework."

She put them on the coffee table and made up her mind. "I'm leaving," she said, grabbing at her bag. He was surprisingly unresisting, instead watching her with a small, unreadable smile. She stopped and looked over at him warily. _'Something is wrong.'_ A thought occurred. She checked the front pocket of her bag.

"…Where are my keys?"

He smiled at her, much less inscrutably. There was inescapable note of delighted malice contained between those upturned lips. "I had to let myself in somehow." She opened her mouth and he cut her off. "I couldn't leave the door to an apartment containing an unconscious woman unlocked when I left." Kaiba sent her a deeply mischievous look. "It wouldn't be gentlemanly."

She just looked at him. "I now understand your abilities as an evil corporate mastermind. Also, I fucking hate you."

He laughed audibly for the first time in her experience, letting the rich, malignant sound fill her apartment with a kind of infectious evil joy. She put her bag down and sat heavily on the floor before edging quietly towards the bathroom. He looked down his nose at her.

"I don't care what you do in there, Nauswell. If you lock yourself in there to avoid me, I'll take the door off of the hinges."

It was impossible not to be awestruck by the weird, ruthless happiness he emanated when in control. _'He is the Little Boy,'_ she thought vaguely, watching his lean figure recline against the wall adjacent to his bed. "Mephistopheles," she said suddenly. "What do you want from me?"

He chortled again at the reference. "Your soul is of no interest to me. You know what I want."

It was said with such a deeply suggestive tone of hunger that she had to force herself not to misunderstand. There was something so innately sexual about the way he spoke, in such measured tones, his voice so deep and resonant she could feel it rumble in her ribcage, that everything he said seemed like an invitation to crawl over and sit between his feet like a dog, staring up and begging for a reward.

She hated it. He offended her pride without ever asking her to do anything demeaning at all. She looked away, and picked at the cheap beige carpet. "You said you wanted answers."

"Explanations," he clarified. "I want you to explain yourself to me."

_'Ah,'_ she thought. He really was in his element. He wielded the word _explain_ like a biologist's scalpel, demanding she lay her guts open for him to see. Jennifer laughed at herself. _'Six days in, and I'm already going crazy.'_ She picked pieces of old, congealed nailpolish out of the carpet, marveling at the longevity of the colours. "What is there to explain?"

"Where did you learn French?"

She looked up at him again, startled. "That's your question?" she asked. She'd been expecting something more sinister and perverse, for reasons she couldn't explain. He just looked back silently. "I attended a French immersion school from the age of five to ten. Some of my mother's family lives in France, some in Quebec. We visit them regularly."

"English?"

She sent him a narrow look. "I lived in Ontario from three to ten; I lived in various parts of the United States from ten to eighteen. Now I'm here."

"Where were you born?"

She was a little startled that he hadn't asked about the Welsh. "Okinawa. My mother is French and Japanese, and was living with my grandmother when she met my father here."

He was quiet for a few moments, and she watched him under her eyelashes. So far, everything had been innocuous, nothing nearly as inflammatory as she had expected; certainly nothing that merited potentially locking her out of her own apartment. "Why did you come to Domino?"

She hesitated, and looked down. "It's complicated."

She could hear his feet padding lightly on the carpet, and the rustle of his uniform pants as he crouched. She steadfastly resisted looking up.

The fingers came out again, reaching for her face like the long slim talons of a medical vice, and she panicked.

"Why do you keep _touching_ me?!" she yelled, and stared furiously at him. "I'm looking at you, I'm looking, okay? Stop grabbing me!"

He looked more amused than anything else. "You _do_ remember. And you're learning. Now, why did you come to Domino? "

It was hard to keep her eyes focused on his face without experiencing that same childlike desire to touch it. She set her mouth in a hard line. "Graduated with honours. Exceptional test scores. Scholarship. The only one of three children to achieve the marks for university, let alone overseas study. Arrived and was told I had to complete Japanese highschool before my entrance exam would be accepted, because of the poor quality of my school in America." She glowered. "Are you satisfied?"

He didn't look satisfied. He looked curious.

"How old are you?"

She frowned. "Twenty in June."

He laughed a little through his nose. "Why did you pick our school?"

It was the moment of truth, and even thinking of the answer pained her. She rolled her head to the side, and slapped away his questing hand. "I was always told that Japanese people pointedly avoid touching others when they can!" She snapped. He chuckled again.

"Social niceties aren't necessary between you and I, Nauswell. Be flattered I'll touch you at all. Did you come to Domino because of Motou's gaming history?"

She crowed loudly at that. "I have no interest in your pretty card games, Kaiba." He looked at her expectantly, his fingers pushing past her hand and lightly gripping her chin. Jennifer groaned, resisting the urge to kick him and smear dust on his uniform. "I came to Domino because it was outside of Tokyo city limits, had a good, mixed student body, and was the only place I could find that I would never have to worry about being the top student and attracting unwanted expectations." She let her face sit in his hand, sighing in defeated frustration.

His eyebrows shot up.

"You came to Domino to hide behind me."

It wasn't a question.

"I didn't expect to have to hide _from_ you," she complained. "It never even occurred to me that you'd notice I existed beyond a cursory sense. I figured you'd be another aloof, socially dysfunctional nerd, ignoring everyone and everything aside from your company." She started to rant. "I assumed your publicity, weird clothes, speeches- I assumed that it was ingenious public relations, that you had a relations office with their fingers so deep into the asshole of popular culture that they had turned you into a science-fiction anti-hero, the legend of the _card game fucking wasteland_," she was yelling at the ceiling, unable to stop herself, "And I was _wrong_. You _weren't_ a quiet, overplayed nerd. You were some sort of impossible, arrogant, living embodiment of challenge that I couldn't resist, couldn't fucking keep my mouth shut, and suddenly _everyone_ knew who I was, everyone expected me to go hang out with a bunch of sixteen-year-old geeks who hang out in game shops, and it was _your_ fault and _I fucking hated you for it_." She shuddered, slumped back against the wall, and took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. "I couldn't understand how you did it, managing the dogs so effortlessly as they barked and fought and rolled in their own shit, constantly crushing in around you, couldn't figure out where you pulled the whistle from, but now I know, and even though I know, I still hear the fucking whistle," She sighed, feeling blank and depressed that she had laid herself open as expected. "And I still drool, just another one of Pavlov's dogs." She was drawling inarticulately, beyond caring, and just shifted her eyes away uncomfortably at his piercing stare.

"What is the whistle?"

She snorted. "You're the whistle, Seto Kaiba. I don't like listening to you because I'm the only dog here smart enough to realize the reward isn't coming." She laughed at herself. "I'll just sit here waxing poetic instead, thanks."

His thumb stroked down her trachea, and she glanced over to see him looking at her with an expression not far from rudimentary fondness. "How Swiftian of you," he commented. "What makes you think no reward is coming?"

She stared at him without interest. "All you have ever done is taken things from me."

"I brought you food."

She couldn't help it. She giggled. "I'm not actually a dog. That's not my primary motivation in life."

"It's a healthier one than narcotics." He dropped to his knees, and pinched her braid musingly. "Your hair is tied back. I thought you only did that when you slept."

"I'm amazed you noticed at all, honestly," she retorted, feeling mildly uncomfortable for reasons she couldn't explain. Even kneeling, he was still head and shoulders above her. She could smell his spicy cologne. "Leather, musk… sandalwood?" she asked. He cocked an eyebrow at her. "Your scent."

He cocked both. "Smelling me?"

"I can't help it. You're very close."

"It's a small apartment."

She glowered. "Maybe you just stink."

He smirked at her. "You may just be too aware of me. I whistle, you drool?"

Jennifer sent him a scathing glare. "This is why I avoid talking to you."

"So you _are_ too aware of me." He dropped down further, putting his arms on his knees so that he was face-level with her. His bright, amused eyes swam in her vision. "You really will have a stroke when you stay with me."

She sighed. "_Ydych yn gwneud imi gandryll, ond yr wyf yn dal yn awyddus i gael rhyw gyda chi._ _Efallai fy mod yn sâl... neu gwallgof. _Not unless you intend to be constantly in my presence." His eyes glittered like mica disks.

"I like to maintain control of proceedings in my household."

She moaned and swore at him. "So you really won't let me out of your sight."

"Not even out of arm's reach when you're not sleeping, if I get the chance." His eyes narrowed. "And we both know you don't do that often. I don't trust many people in my home."

_'This was the worst idea ever.' _Jennifer Nauswell slumped further down, feeling defeated. "Sounds like fun. Going to keep me on a leash and make me sleep at the foot of your bed?"

He looked as though he was seriously contemplating it. She threw her hands up.

"I was joking, Jesus!"

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

Friday had passed quickly and quietly, and she was stalling and dithering in a way that made him maliciously intent on his objective.

"Nauswell, this is not a multiple choice question. We are going to my home shortly, and I am going to designate you a room."

The petite girl was trying to compromise again. "You go ahead and go home; I'll come in the morning. It's not that big of a deal, we don't have to include it in the report, I'm not done packing-"

He cut her off. "I'm not giving you the opportunity to find and stash more drugs before you come into my home. Be grateful if I don't have my security go through your bags. Anything you don't have now I can provide for you."

She looked a little wild-eyed, but went silent, stalking into the bathroom. He could hear her nails clicking on the counter as deliberated over what to take, inevitably standing with her lower lip between her teeth unconsciously.

He blinked at the strength of the mental image, and shook his head in a sharp, brisk movement, as if to clear water from his ears. He could hear her makeup case rattling and the signature _shush_ing sound of toothbrush bristles as they slid into a travel enclosure. She walked out and shoved everything in her bag, and then turned and stared at him blankly. He could tell she had shut down again, and wondered if he was going to have a repeat episode of Wednesday.

She stared at him expressionlessly, revealing nothing. He held the door open for her, and locked it behind her.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_


	7. Chapter 7

_**Note**__: Go to YouTube and look up Tom Waits' __**God's Away on Business**__._

_Oh, hey, guys? I know how to use the hits/visitors stats. Close to sixty people read Chapters 5 and 6. Only a few lovely people were sweet enough to take the… say, twenty seconds it takes to review. _

_If you like something, say so. If you don't like something, say so. If you don't care, don't say anything at all. _

_Not receiving any feedback at all despite tons of people reading six chapters in a single go and adding the story to their alerts or favourites is the most discouraging thing to a writer. I want to hear from you. The fact that you alerted this story doesn't tell me what you like, what parts made you laugh or gasp or shiver, and it doesn't tell me what you want to see or are afraid will happen._

_It's just radio silence._

_The worst part is that __**I know you're there**__._

_Edit: Oh, Jennifer. Why are all my original characters a tad crazy? I think this reflects badly on me. Also, this chapter is a crap-ton of description. _

_Double-Edit: Uh… I am a creepy person. I didn't intend this to be creepy._

_Triple-Edit: I'm starting to think this should just be titled __**No Sleep, Never Sleep**__._

_**Summary:**__ An actually good version of the traditional 'One week at my house, one week at yours' jive assignment. Why? Because it was his fault in the first place. KaibaxOC (Be warned: They're not going to be playing nice.)_

_**Warning:**__ Probable sensuality, innuendos, and sexual tension. Oh, and psychopathic hatred._ _And crudity. Lots and lots of crudity._

_**Disclaimer: **__I didn't kill Gozaburo. Kazuki Takahashi did._

_You're So Spoiled!_

_Chapter Seven_

Seto Kaiba finally understood what it was like to own a cat.

She was in a reasonably good mood, now, and was singing again. She sang more than he had realized, barely audibly, under her breath. Despite the low, rough tenor of her voice, it was strangely pleasant, sounding mostly like the muted snuffling of a purr. He could only hear it at all because her voice carried eerily in the large rooms of his home, bringing him snatches of English words, occasional French phrases.

Seto Kaiba suspected it was a coping mechanism. She had been twitchy, moving in abrupt, jerky intervals and languishing silently in between. It was something he could understand; he remembered the nervous anger he had felt when he and Mokuba had first been brought to the Kaiba estate. The building itself was a challenge of straight lines, dark painted, satin finish walls and lacquer-shiny marble floors dotted with richly textured furniture seemingly too pristine to do anything but look at.

He wondered suddenly if she viewed him the same way he had viewed his stepfather, and felt a mixed surge of resentment and pity.

It was late on Saturday afternoon, and true to his word, he had done his best not to allow her out of his sight aside from when she slept or used the bathroom, and she, in return, swung between the defeated whining of an addict in withdrawal and the total hateful silence of the forcibly sober.

He had told her she could be alone if she was willing to stay in her room, hoping that he could, in return, have some time for uninterrupted work.

Instead, she'd turned to him with the blank, glassy stare she acquired in her quiet periods and said, "_If you so wish, Dame Gothel,_" in English. She then began to braid her hair over her shoulder with every appearance of absent-mindedness.

He didn't understand the reference, but he did understand the concept of an indirect refusal.

As a result, he was watching her narrowly over his laptop as she reclined on the sofa in his study. It was a circumstance so inexcusably suspect that he didn't blame his brother's raised eyebrows and pointed absence at the sight of them. He wasn't getting as much done as he had at her home, and he knew exactly why.

_'A contextual concept,'_ he thought, distracted yet again by her odd habits. Finally relaxed, she was playing with the loose computer cables along the wall with her bare feet, lying sprawled across the creamy beige leather of the couch. The curls of hair escaping her braid made a static halo around her face, and she batted them away from her mouth, looking down at her twining, exploring toes, twisted through thick black cables.

She was a different creature in different settings, and in the dingy greys and browns of her apartment she'd been like a manic set-piece, chameleon-like, close enough in colouration to her surroundings that her behaviour was all that drew attention. Here, in the rich textures and colours of his home, she stood out undeniably, the lioness in the wolf exhibit.

So out of place that he couldn't avoid looking.

Not out of place. _'That's not it.'_ He struggled with the correct image, and had an epiphany. _'Juxtaposed.'_ That was it. It wasn't that Jennifer Nauswell clashed with his décor; she offset it, like a centrepiece, and rather than being offended by her presence, he was instead naturally drawn to it. His mind provided him the image of a sleek, high-backed - _'aromatic_'- rosewood chair in a green room full of garish furniture with gold scrolling.

It seemed appropriate. He allowed it.

She lolled off of the edge of the couch, bored with the cables, and stared upside down at him. "Stop that," she said commandingly. He had a moment of puzzled paranoia as he considered what she was referring to. "You're staring again."

_'Ah.'_ He shifted his eyes away silently. He saw her start examining her fingers in his peripheral vision, and looked back curiously. _'I've seen her do that before.'_ She glowered. He looked away.

It was too hard not to look his centrepiece.

_ 'Mine?'_

A thought occurred.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

She felt her fuse shrinking, and wondered what would happen when it hit her brain.

_ 'Will I implode or explode? Maybe I'll achieve singularity status.'_

His intense, pale eyes on her made her more jittery than his wildly unnerving Transylvanian manor did. She actually liked his house quite a bit. The lush reds and blacks of it appealed to her sensibilities. She tried not to look at the blues or browns- difficult, considering the amount of fine leather she was encountering- because something about those rooms screamed _'I am Seto Kaiba's. You are enfolded within me,'_ and she had to resist the urge to take that as both a challenge and a rather womb-like Freudian commentary.

He had just raised his eyebrows quizzically when she had refused to use the dark brown easy-chair in his office, but she was glad he hadn't asked. Somehow, explaining that it summoned up conscious images of being swallowed in his hair seemed like a difficult prospect.

She had long since admitted that she was starting to lose her mind. When she'd first crossed the threshold and looked up at the chandelier hanging in front of the three open levels of the foyer, surrounded by winding dark marble staircases like twisted cabaret sets and operatic balconies from which the upper levels looked, she'd felt a sudden overwhelming sense of agoraphobia, and had crushed it by promptly and eagerly going a little bit mad. Everything about his house made her feel like the unfortunate protagonist in a vampire novel, and she wasn't certain she hadn't begun to see things.

For example, the appearance and prompt disappearance of a black ball of speaking hair had thrown her quite badly.

His house was still infinitely more inviting than him.

She wanted to tease him for dressing so formally in his own home, but instead of looking stiff, or as impossibly funny as he had sitting cross-legged on her worn futon, he looked perfectly aligned with his surroundings, as much a tasteful combination of colours and masterful straight lines as any of the other expensive furniture. He had stopped being _Seto Kaiba, infuriating- but attractive!- unwanted guest _and had begun to be _Seto Kaiba, Lord of the Manor, voice that whispers from the air behind your ear and the eye that follows from paintings_.

Yes, Jennifer was going insane.

_'I have to get out of here,'_ she thought, too drunk on her teetering instability to be desperate about it. The prospect of _Away_ had reached the importance of basic need. She craved _Away_ more than she craved her pills.

Sometimes.

He wouldn't stop looking at her, and constant observation was understandably impeding her escape options.

His eyes watched her and said aloud _"You could go to your room, Jennifer, and be alone for a while."_

She responded, smiling, _'Ah, but the eggshell blue wallpaper and ecru bedsheets… your skin, your eyes.'_ She chuckled without making a sound._ "You're swallowing me whole again."_

"What?"

She realized too late that she had made a sound. The rest of Kaiba's face was looking at her now, bemused and curious. He repeated his question. She recognized gratefully that she had spoken aloud in Welsh.

Staring him down, she twisted her fingers in her brain and made an effort to pull herself to coherency. "What?" she asked him back. He looked amused. His face was so perfectly symmetrical, so infuriatingly airbrush perfect, so impossible. She felt herself teetering again.

He raised his eyebrows. "Come here."

She listed perilously back into the range of insanity. Fingers under her chin, her lips on the skin of his arm. His mouth, her name. Her breath hitched. She clawed at coherency.

His hands on her unconscious body, carrying her to bed. She could see it; his mildly disgruntled, disinterested stance, scooping her easily off of the floor, her shoulders shifting, her face against his shirt. His fingers under his knees, under her chin.

She pitched forward like a seasick landlover on a pirate ship.

"Fffffuck," she groaned, and buried her face into her legs. She could hear him sighing, sounding more resigned than surprised, as though he had expected it. His feet purred on the expensive flooring.

"I'm taking you to your room," he said, and she laughed uncontrollably.

It was everything she could do not to be inappropriate as he lifted her by the waist. Easily. _'Too easily. I've been forgetting.'_

She couldn't remember when she had last eaten, and had a vaguely coherent understanding that it was probably contributing to her current state. _'Protein bars. Protein, protein and fibre.' _And then, _'Bananas. Low Potassium.'_

It was so unreal, being helped- _'dragged, carried' -_ through the dark hallways to her room, almost as though she were breezing along without touching the ground. It didn't help her deranged impression of a vampire's castle. _'Into the lair of the beast. Enfolded.'_

He dumped her on her bed inelegantly, and she shot back to consciousness for a long enough instant to know that falling asleep between those sheets with those colours behind her eyelids would make her dream.

"No," she demanded. He left without responding. The key slid in the lock.

She heard herself screaming aloud as she slipped under.

_"Je ne veux pas être seul à l'intérieur de vous!"_

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

Seto Kaiba rubbed a hand over his face, exhausted.

While episode had meant that he had gotten a considerable amount of work done, which he was thankful for, Mokuba's unusually quiet behaviour had meant that he hadn't caught on to the time until the walls started to blur into the floor. It was with amusement that he felt a twinge of sympathy for his dysfunctional ward. _'I cannot imagine not having the satisfaction of sleeping right now.'_ The corner of his screen flickered (_SUN/04:22)_ as he shut his computer down, and he took the hint.

His house seemed too dark compared to the lacklustre beiges he had become accustomed to. He briefly considered redecorating and dismissed it as temporary insanity.

His hand paused on the handle of his door. It was gleaming under his fingers, golden in the slight illumination. It took him a moment to recognize the issue.

It was illuminated. By light. _'Of which there should be none at the moment.'_

He looked. Light was streaming from Jennifer's open door. He approached, and looked again.

Her door was open. It looked wrong. _'I was sure I had locked this.'_

He realized.

It was wrong. It had been opened the wrong way. He slid his eyes to bare edge of the door.

The hinges had been torn out of the wall, leaving strips of bare grey drywall. The door was hanging open, hingelike, from its lock. _'How did I not hear this?'_ Something was wrapped in cloth in pieces of loosened drywall. He reached for it. It was a mangled looking metal belt buckle wrapped in a shirt. _'Ah.'_

The room was more than a disaster. All of the sheets had been ripped off of the bed, shoved partially under the wardrobe, tilting it back at an angle against the wall. The curtains had been pulled ajar, across the walls as if the window had sprouted wings. He saw a heeled shoe jammed behind the nightstand, holding one side in place. Clothes were strewn everywhere. The torn remainder of a leather belt was wrapped around the bedpost.

_'Holy God.'_

Even tired as he was, a sense of desperate urgency gripped him. '_Mokuba? Where's Mokuba?'_ He walked crisply and silently through the hall, careful to keep his footsteps quiet. _'Where is she?'_

Mokuba wasn't in his room. He cast around for a sign. For once, he was grateful to find a carefully stashed note. _"Sorry, Big Brother. Out at Yuki's. Didn't want to interrupt!"_ The combination of relief and dark humour that surged into him made it impossible to laugh.

_'Where is she?'_ As his concern ebbed, rage replaced it. "I'm going to kill you," he snarled without meaning to. _'In my house. Not in my house.' _The last of his patience ebbed into adrenaline-fuelled malice.

_ 'Not in my house.'_

Something clattered downstairs and stopped abruptly, as though it had been slapped down by a questing hand. _'The kitchen?'_ He walked carefully down the staircase. The dark marble gleamed in the light shining through his windows from the street. His skull was pounding. A soft scraping to his left.

_'The kitchen.'_

He peered in cautiously and couldn't see her. The light above the island was on, sending long shadows across every surface, making monstrous artifacts out of his appliances, for all the world like the sun had risen in the middle of a stainless steel wasteland. He cast around for her with narrowed eyes, keeping close to the walls. "Nauswell, where are you?" He kept his shoulders tense, ready to dash, unsure how many knives had been in the knifeblock originally. He counted eight. "Jennifer?"

The darkness giggled. _'She's here.'_ He cursed the remodeler's love of deep counters and hanging cabinets. "Jennifer, come out." She was quiet. He coaxed with no intentions of honouring his promises. "Whatever it is you want, I can it to give you. You know that." She laughed openly, brashly at that, her rough voice echoing against metal and stone.

"There's always free cheddar in the mousetrap, baby."

He started, and looked. The chipped coral nail polish on her bare toes slid out of the shadow of a corner and he could suddenly see her, as if she had formed like a hound of Tindalos from the angles.

She was sitting on the counter in her underwear with two lit cigarettes between her fingers and a half-empty bottle of cooking sherry. She leaned out of the shadow and blew smoke in a curling plume towards him. The light made it as white and opaque as cotton. "You should be in bed, kid. It's late." She raised her fingers to her mouth and took a drag of both at once.

He wondered how he hadn't seen her. The burning tips of the cigarettes glowed like red eyes in the dark, and bits of ash tumbled down when she drew.

The adrenaline left him with a sigh. He wondered which of his security she had bummed them off of.

"I didn't know you smoked," he muttered.

"I don't."

He laughed under his breath. "I see."

"I suppose you do." She was silent for a moment, dragging on her eyes in the dark. "Whatever I want, eh?"

He watched her twitching fingers rattle their nails on the steel countertop. "A lie. I won't give them to you." Her knees were bony, purpled with old scars. "You must be cold."

"I figured." And then, "Yeah." She offered him a cigarette.

He refused it and set about making coffee. She chuckled, and it vibrated the hollow counter.

"I suppose no one in this house will sleep."

_(You're So Spoiled!)_


	8. Chapter 8

_**Note**__: Churnin' 'em out like meat from a grinder. WandererRaen, we understand each other and I like that. _

_Had exams; excuse the delay. Wanted to write, couldn't, wrote the last one while I was supposed to be studying. If I get a bad mark, it's all your fault._

_A Million Years Later Edit: Apparently I'm a hiatus writer._

_GOOD LAWD, AH LIVE ONLY FO' THESE SWEET AND PALPITATIN' WOHDS OF WISDOM! DO NOT TAKE YOU' SWEETNESS FROM MAH LAWD, FO' I WILL HAVE NONE OF SATAN'S GIFTS!_

_**Summary:**__ An actually good version of the traditional 'One week at my house, one week at yours' jive assignment. Why? Because it was his fault in the first place. KaibaxOC (Be warned: They're not going to be playing nice.)_

_**Warning:**__ Probable sensuality, innuendos, and sexual tension. Oh, and psychopathic hatred._ _And crudity. Lots and lots of crudity._

_**Disclaimer: **__I didn't kill Gozaburo. Kazuki Takahashi did._

_You're So Spoiled!_

_Chapter Eight_

They'd spent a silent Sunday morning together, devoid of tension for the simple fact that he was just too exhausted to care. He drank coffee. She relinquished her bottle with reluctance, but finished her cigarettes. They sat in his kitchen silently, passed through his living room silently, and ignored each other in his study silently.

The afternoon was different. She had a surprising resistance to alcohol, and all it had done was mellowed her pleasantly. As the sherry faded from her system, it became obvious that her breakdown was the key to another state of bizarre withdrawal, totally different from before.

He suddenly understood why she had deigned to abstain from caffeine. The nicotine was persisting in her system. The danger of sleeping pills was their lingering presence, but judging by her strength against a bottle of fortified wine versus the effects of two cigarettes, he doubted that had been a concern.

He understood why she had been so coherent on waking.

His feeling of kinship with pet owners was also deepening.

She was flighty, hyperactive, incapable of keeping still, a virtual well of excessive energy. She sat for no more than ten seconds before pacing. Longer, and he was subjected to her uncontrollable fidgeting. She had lost her already unsteady control of her expressions, and did things that made it impossible to pay attention to his work.

She chewed her lips. She hummed and sighed under her breath. She played with her hair. She touched herself, running her fingers along her arms, her collarbones, down her neck, almost as though she was reassuring herself she still existed. Her mood was exultant, and she would smile at nothing, at herself, with a sudden fleeting expression of total captivating evil mischief.

She did it all with the absolute appearance of being totally unaware she was doing it.

It was too interesting, too absorbing to watch her express her little foibles and eccentricities unconsciously. He had realized, too late, that this was worse than her contrived attempt to offset him in her apartment. Then, he had been unnerved, curious, and wary. Now, he was dangerously caught between being too relaxed and too tense, and he was too tired to deal with it correctly. _'This whole situation is__** too**__ everything.'_

He wanted desperately to lock her in her room, to put her away like a distracting painting or a nostalgic old toy, but that was not a possibility. He didn't feel like replacing any more hinges, and his house was surprisingly- unfortunately- bare of actual dungeons and towers.

_'Rapunzel was never as troublesome as you,'_ he thought, catching on to her old reference, watching her again. This time, she didn't reprimand him for watching. She didn't appear to notice. She was reading with one hand, the book propped open by her thumb and pinkie- like a human artist's easel. She tapping the legs of the chair with her feet and twisting her fingers in her hair, leaving momentary faint curls when she shifted her grip. She chewed her lip and laughed sharply before sending him a vague, embarrassed look of reproach.

_'I'm never going to get anything done,' _he thought, irritated, and closed his laptop. The whirring hum of the motor slowed as the computer went into standby. He looked up to see her peering interestedly at it, her book closed on a finger in her lap. "What?"

She didn't flinch at his sharpness. "I've always liked that sound- when it slows down. It reminds me of hummingbirds." She was still fidgeting, feeling the dent behind her right clavicle with two fingers, but she looked thoughtful. "Yours is lower, softer, though. Newer fans are always quieter. I suppose it's strange of me to like the sound of inferior equipment."

Again, as always, another comment, blind-siding him from the left, something potentially a very subtle insinuation or a very broad innocent assertion. Even both, maybe. He struggled again, unsure whether to relax and be watchful. It was difficult; she almost reminded him of Mokuba. "That is strange of you."

She sent him a sharp, tired look of focus. "I'm not the only strange one." Her face softened again and her eyes wandered across the still-active computer on his desk, and down the cable connecting it to his laptop. "Is it more comfortable, working like that? The heat will damage your pants."

He was a little amused. "I assure you I had the foresight to circumvent that problem. The cooling system is only a regulator for overclocking and overuse; my machine runs very efficiently, and does not produce much heat." He ran his fingers down the sides, across the USB ports. "And I suppose it is habit."

A flicker of Nauswell again, looking reproached and envious. "Of course. I should've guessed." Momentary vague flitting of the eyes and fingers, and then sudden focus. "You're not working?"

"My attention is compromised."

For a moment, she gave him a look of such absolute disturbed awareness that felt irrationally afraid that she could read his mind. It faded into sleepy vagueness before he could really register it. "Something about you makes me very tired." She shook herself, lacing her still-absently wandering fingers together. "Let's get out of this office. Don't you ever do anything entertaining?" She paused and gave him a sidelong look. "Something that doesn't involve tormenting me?"

He was puzzled. _'From militantly defensiveness to frenzied desperation to frenetic activity- and now back to drawling remarks and sleep-deprived irritation." _He wondered how that would chart on a graph. "I do relax occasionally."

"Sleep, holidays and major disasters don't count."

He avoided her snide look. "We do have an extensive entertainment system. Mokuba uses it more than I do."

Her face did something strange, scrunching inwards and outwards in surprise. "Your brother? Does he have black hair?" She paused. "Long black hair?" She shook her head. "Nevermind. I always forget; robots only have complementary models, not real relatives." She smiled narrowly at him. "Like the crane and tongs in a crane game."

He was more insulted than amused, but he couldn't avoid appreciating the humour. "I do have a brother, and I can assure you that he is an organic creature," he drawled. "Did you want to distract yourself? I have no complaints; Unfortunately, I'm still not willing to allow you free reign of my home, Nauswell." He slid his laptop into a desk drawer. _'Not after last night.'_

She smirked a little, still half-vague but mostly just exhausted. "Fucking tired, man. Nicotine's draining, I guess," she muttered. "Yeah. Sounds good. Peachy keen, cherries and cream. Nothing like a vegetative experience." She had started off into another autovague mumble a la sober Jennifer, and he waited patiently for her to finish.

She just slumped and chuckled, getting over the last manic hitch of her stimulant. "Onwards, Silver. _Hi ho, and away._"

Her arm pointed to the door for a moment before falling listlessly on the arm of the chair. "Take me to the vegetable garden, _mi compadre._"

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

With both of them too exhausted to fight or work and a large, engrossing television playing the worst daytime soaps, they'd achieved a bizarre sort of companionship.

Kaiba had even smiled at a couple of her cracks at the acting and terrible dialogue, which she considered a great success. Sobered up and having recovered a little energy with the consumption of food and the final passing of her manic state, she tapered off her comments, embarrassed.

It had been too easy to forget that he had given her his dress jacket to cover up when she refused to go back to her room, even to gather clothes. It was long, and covered what was necessary, but her dark bra peeked out from between the lapels. She had to resist the urge to sit with her legs tucked to her chest on the couch or risk exposing miles of bare leg, or more, covered only by a thin red cotton sheathing.

He had been polite, and had kept his eyes on her face, but she could tell even daytime television giving him something to direct his attention to had helped tremendously. She spoke tentatively. "I should put on some clothes."

"If you like."

She couldn't surpress amusement. "Are you inviting me to lounge around your house in a state of... ah, _dishabille_, Seto Kaiba?" she teased.

"If you like."

She couldn't resist the bait, however ambiguously it was given. "_Oh Jesus, Lawd in sweet heaven,"_ she said in a dry Southern drawl, and laughed aloud, sending him a playful sidelong look. He was looking back at her with an expression that was markedly unimpressed. "_Only the Lawd can save you now! Repent and go foreva' to his side!"_ His expression darkened with something like exasperation, and she laughed again, waving her hands extravagantly over her head, too entertained to stop. _"Come unto Jesus, sweet chald, fo' he is thine savior!"_ She jabbed him experimentally in the chest, and he swatted at her hand. She grabbed his shoulders cheerfully, just to see him twitch. She didn't have time to say anything else.

She wasn't even sure which of them had started it.

She could taste coffee and smell cologne and her hands were buried in hair that was unbelievably soft and thick and his hand was sliding along her thigh like it belonged there and she was _shivering_. _'Oh, Jesus,'_ she thought in earnest as she was pulled closer and the chest beneath that shirt was just right amount of warm and firm.

Her brain had shut off again. She struggled with the truth of why she was participating in a **Bad Idea**, because she knew that there was one. One hand had slid under the jacket and was following the line of her of underwire across her ribcage and the other was around her waist, pulling her closer. She groaned, but she couldn't remember if it was because she wanted it or didn't. She fisted her hands in that hair and pulled herself closer, breathing coffee and expensive cologne.

Soft lips, just like she'd surmised, with a sort of moderate style that never gave enough to stop the _want_. Occasionally, the tiniest suggestion of tongue, but never enough to be sloppy. The hair, not knowing whose, brushing against her cheek, but not enough to warrant detaching a hand and disturbing the peace.

_'What are you doing?'_ Something asked. She ignored it. It asked again, as his fingers pushed beneath her bra, gentle and exploratory, making sounds appear in the air that she wasn't sure weren't coming from within herself.

_'I'm just doing,'_ she told it, and it told her she was doing a bad thing. She shoved it away, trying not to shiver as she pushed a hand under the collar of his shirt. His hand retreated from under the jacket and grabbed her wrist. She laughed into his mouth.

_'Who?' _it asked.

_ 'What who? When who? How who?' _she asked back. _'Who who, the owl?'_

_ Who_. Suddenly, who became an issue.

Seto Kaiba was a who. Seto Kaiba was _the_ who.

Jennifer shoved herself away with a hand still against his chest, and knocked a grunt out of him with her fidgeting. He looked annoyed, but not surprised. He lifted his arm from around her waist. She fidgeted, waffling for a moment, and then ran, stiff-legged and awkward, out of the room.

He didn't follow her.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_


	9. Chapter 9

_**Note**__: I'm trying to be back on track again, but feeling the heat. Seriously. It's ridiculously hot here, and I live in a one hundred and twenty year old house and the sink in my bathroom is always clogged and the insulation in the walls has slid down over so much time but we can't fix it because a thousand layers of paint and floral wallpaper is all that holds the hundred year old plaster and lathe in and we only have one fan between the four of us._

_My fan._

_They keep stealing it, but I can't get mad about it because it's just __**so fucking hot**__. _

_Like maybe this chapter will be. Or maybe it won't be. Hmm. _

_Edit: I'm finishing this at two in the morning the day before I have to meet and interview a potential roommate. Thank you, fanfiction, for seducing me away from my loving bed._

_This chapter is a little shorter than usual, but there's no way I'm following the scene until you've got your speculations running wild._

_I wonder how you'll all react to this turn of events._

_**Summary:**__ An actually good version of the traditional 'One week at my house, one week at yours' jive assignment. Why? Because it was his fault in the first place. KaibaxOC (Be warned: They're not going to be playing nice.)_

_**Warning:**__ Probable sensuality, innuendos, and sexual tension. Oh, and psychopathic hatred._ _And crudity. Lots and lots of crudity._

_**Disclaimer: **__I didn't kill Gozaburo. Kazuki Takahashi did._

_You're So Spoiled!_

_Chapter Nine_

School was weirder than usual. Their classmates' speculation had finally settled on mutual lobotomy, followed by strong psychotropic drugs.

Jennifer Nauswell and Seto Kaiba were no longer ignoring each other, but actively participating in a bizarre two-person game of '_I know not of whom you speak'_.

After Jennifer had run stilt-like from the room, she'd gone to her own room and changed, carefully folding his jacket in the corner and ignoring it, at a loss for anything else to do. It was the first time she had been unattended in his house, and for once, she wanted desperately not to be alone with her thoughts.

Only slightly more pressing was the need not to be anywhere near the only other person she knew of in the house.

Jennifer had always been terrible at lying to herself.

Consequently, her thoughts should have been ample, unwanted company.

Instead, her inner voice was strangely silent.

She'd brooded, chewing her nails, pacing, pulling out stray hairs, completely puzzled at herself and receiving only intellectual static from her inner voice. Her heart had palpitated, and she didn't even know if it was from withdrawal or arousal or plan unabashed shock. Her head had buzzed blankly, and she couldn't be sure if it was a symptom or a reaction.

In that room, she could still taste coffee and feel his fingers ghosting along the red elastic separating her outer thigh from her inner one.

His touch had always had a strangely lingering effect on her, she'd decided, regardless of her distaste- '_or taste'_, she'd thought, and it'd felt lonely to supply her own unconscious thoughts- for him.

She had felt as though she was lying to herself through omission, and it was an intensely guilty, bothersome emotion, but there were no details forthcoming to appease her.

Mostly, she had felt as though she were about to tear her nail beds open with frantic chewing.

When she'd finally come down, he was in his study, working. She'd been struck by sudden nervousness, rendered skittish by only the sight of brown and cream.

He had only glanced over when she came closer. She'd realized then, with the first palpable unconscious moan of nervous agony in hours, that he wasn't going to say anything if she didn't.

She'd brought it up, mumbling and twitching frenetically. He'd just looked at her, expressionless, waiting.

"What the fuck just happened?" she'd burst, zeppelinesque, forcing herself to be still, still more desperate to clarify her sanity than anxious to be away. He'd continued his siege of blankness, his voice almost as deadpan as his face.

"What are you referring to?"

She'd skittered again, fidgeting. "Daytime sitcoms, aired once before vomiting. In the living room. With a suit jacket. That." She stopped. "That?"

He'd turned away. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

_'Ah.'_

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

Amidst the fearful speculation on campus, the days passed with an eerie silence befitting Kaiba's Transylvanian manor. They spoke as rarely as they had the first days he'd stayed at her home. For all appearances, things had reverted to their original state of radio silence.

With one startling exception.

Jennifer, newly sober, returned almost immediately to her pre-addiction habit of sudden waking powernaps- a bizarre ritual of slow breathing, closed eyes and perfect stillness, combined with the subsequent imbibing of almost a litre of water mixed with a cup of sugar- and was relatively alert and functioning almost all hours of the day.

Seto Kaiba, consumed by his need to monitor her presence in his home whenever she was awake- which was, of course, always- was slowly sinking into the dangerous and unpredictable state of complete and utter _**not giving a shit**_.

On Monday, he'd stopped wearing his jacket inside, and worked with a dogged persistence that did credit to his resilience.

On Tuesday, he'd left the top three buttons of his shirt undone, and the shirt itself had been untucked for the entire school day. His belt was nowhere in sight. He stopped working after a sedate two hour of blank staring and sudden bursts of energetic typing.

By Wednesday, Jennifer was looking anywhere but at the young man who was reclining in his kitchen, shirt entirely open, socks missing, staring vaguely in the direction of the study. The coffee had been brewed for almost a half hour, but he hadn't so much as twitched in twice that.

She badly wanted to be filled with a dark sadistic joy in knowing that he was suffering in the same way that she had at his hands, but couldn't bring herself to in knowing that he hadn't so much as considered her pills. It made her feel both guilty and impressed.

She'd also discovered another terrible source of fundamental paranoia.

He was slowly fulfilling her original mental image of him, and it was a terrifying thing.

Sitting on a stool, one cheek supported by index finger and thumb, leaning against the counter with his long legs planted wide, his blank expression had ceased to be blank. His stare had instead become an expression of absolute focused intensity that was focused on nothing at all.

Jennifer had discovered that she had been correct in her original assumption that everything her housemate did had an inherent sexuality to it.

Seto Kaiba looked hungry.

She was having difficulty convincing herself that he wasn't considering the logistics of killing her.

He was looking at her. She started. She nervously contemplated what to say, if anything, where to look, if at anything, and what to do, if anything at all.

"Come here."

A frantic alarm sounded in her brain. _'He __**is**__ going to kill me.'_ She scraped her feet forward, just inches closer. He chuckled through his teeth, head still resting in his hand.

She shook her head fiercely, trying to dispel the shyness his staring was inspiring. _"Come closer, Clarice,"_ she told him. He laughed openly at that. She assumed that meant he'd understood.

"I won't eat you."

She wasn't sure she believed that, but she stepped closer again, trying to pretend that she was still as brave and nonchalant as she had been ten days before.

His slim white fingers ghosted out in a sweeping motion, but she was still out of reach. "Are you frightened of me?"

_'And now he's hallucinating,'_ she thought, feeling a strange mixture of guilt and satisfaction. She carefully guided herself around taking his bait, and lied frankly. "No."

"Then come closer."

"No."

He dropped his hand from his face into his lap. "No?" She was baffled. His voice was soft and lyrical, but his face still fiercely intent.

"No," she said again, more firmly. "Why would I?"

He looked impatient and vaguely pained. "I'm bored."

A sting of annoyance. "I'm not your entertainment."

"You are." His refutation was firm and dismissive.

She crossed her arms, glowering. "What is it that you want with me?"

He smiled suddenly, wickedly, but it was gone before she could react, back into that intent look of speculation. "I want you to play a game with me."

_'Definitely hallucinating. Quite possibly hallucinating about playing card games. My life could not get any more fucked up.'_ She eyed him, less afraid and more amused. "What do you want to play? You don't seem to be in any condition for strategizing, Kaiba."

He smirked a little, crookedly. "Nothing like that. A better game." He paused, regarding her with a look of bright, birdlike interest. "If you win, you can ask anything of me."

Jennifer couldn't deny that she was curious. "Anything?"

He just shot her an amused look, eyebrow cocked. She slapped herself internally.

Stakes were first, she supposed. "What do you get?"

"Satisfaction."

Sudden wariness clutching in her gut. "Be serious." He sent her another amused look. She fought the urge to fidget. "What's the game? Rules?"

Another creeping, evil little smile. "No rules. No need."

Definite curiousity mixed with sick excitement and wariness. "The game?"

He smiled again with that sudden fundamental wickedness. "By now, you should realize that participation is not a matter of choice."

"By the end of this week, you're going to beg for me."

_(You're So Spoiled!)_


	10. Chapter 10

_**Note**__: I apologize for the length of this._

_**Summary:**__ An actually good version of the traditional 'One week at my house, one week at yours' jive assignment. Why? Because it was his fault in the first place. KaibaxOC (Be warned: They're not going to be playing nice.)_

_**Warning:**__ Probable sensuality, innuendos, and sexual tension. Oh, and psychopathic hatred._ _And crudity. Lots and lots of crudity._

_**Disclaimer: **__I didn't kill Gozaburo. Kazuki Takahashi did._

_You're So Spoiled!_

_Chapter Ten_

Jennifer was suddenly allowed reign of Kaiba's home, unattended. There hadn't been a reason given, or even an indication that this was true, but it suddenly was, illustrated by her host's pointed absence. She could only assume the reason was for the better execution of Kaiba's perverse, sadistic little game.

She could now freely roam the halls of Dracula's summer castle without accompaniment.

She hated it.

She constantly felt as though Kaiba was around a corner, waiting to pounce, waiting to do... something. Sometimes he was there, and she jumped as demanded, startled and angry. Sometimes he wasn't, and that was somehow worse.

She liked knowing where he was. Not knowing deepened her already tumultuous unease.

Jennifer's problem was that she really could not fathom what the exact meaning of purpose of his game was. Her role was obvious: Request, demand, but do not beg. It wasn't as though she had ever begged before, even in her worst moments of withdrawal, so she supposed she could see the grotesque allure for the controlling young CEO.

But she couldn't, for the life of her, understand exactly how he proposed to make her beg, or what for. As a result, she was beset by the continuous anticipation of sudden attack or coercion for purposes unknown, too like the prospect of being cast down by an unfathomable and unfamiliar heathen god.

The most frightening part of it for her was that despite the removal of his hawkish surveillance, she was convinced that he still was not, and had no intention of, sleeping.

Her reasoning for this was because he still displayed the total unhinged mentality of _**gives no shits**_.

All throughout school on Thursday, he had watched her, unfailingly, through their classes together, through lunch, seemingly unconcerned with the buzz of speculation his attention had aroused in the student body. Upon arriving at home, he had tossed his coat and briefcase- still with the tell-tale clattering of her pills inside- aside and promptly disappeared.

Thursday evening, she was in the living room with the television muted, unwilling to allow the hum of sound to cover the almost inaudible _shush_ing of possibly approaching footsteps on the carpet.

She had been sitting there for almost three hours, checking over her shoulder anxiously to reassure herself that he wasn't leaning over the back of the couch, watching her with those bloodshot, sleepless eyes. The broken capillaries by his sclera just seemed to make the blues in his iris even lighter, lending an unsettling emptiness to his face.

She hadn't heard anything but doors opening and closing and the telltale creaking of a settling foundation in all that time. She had to urinate, she was hungry, and she hadn't had her homemade hummingbird energy drink, but she couldn't discount the paranoid suspicion that he had been waiting expectantly outside the room for her since she'd sat down.

When he had been rested, relatively normal- if contentious and arrogant- she would have discounted it as something he would never do. It was too inefficient. There was work to be done.

Now, she only ever saw that beautiful black and chrome custom-built machine closed and charging in his study, like a comatose hit-and-run victim.

It made her angry for reasons she couldn't explain.

She turned again for her routine check.

He was watching her from the door.

"Shit, _fuck_," she shrieked, jerking so violently and abruptly that her legs skittered across the leather couch like an epileptic's. Her heart was in her ears, punching her eardrums.

He looked uninterested in her profanity. "I remembered," he said.

She could feel the muscles in her face pulling into a recently all-too-familiar expression of wary puzzlement. "Remembered what?"

He gestured quickly, vaguely, with his left hand. "I was looking at your hair." Another dismissive gesture. "When I realized you were on drugs."

She raised her own hand to hair, momentarily confused. "My hair?" A thought occurred. "Oh. My roots." It wasn't a question.

He walked along the outside of the room, around the couch, inspecting the hardwood moulding on the halfpanels. "Yes. Your roots."

She pulled a strand out and looked at it. She could see why he had noticed- she was overdue for a touchup. Only the wildness of her hair was disguising over an inch of growth. When she looked up, he had wandered closer, and was leaning over her. His fingers ghosted her part, pushing the hair flat against her scalp.

She could feel his fingers tracing line across her scalp. "I always thought they came in evenly."

Jennifer relaxed, a little disarmed by his profession of curiousity. She patted the couch beside her, trying not to think about what had happened there before. This time, she was clothed.

He didn't sit, but withdrew his hand. "Most people my age don't have greys, anyway," she shrugged. "Mine are… mostly from stress, I guess." She felt along her scalp, conscious of the telltale coarseness of the affected hairs.

Kaiba's hand gravitated back to her part. "They're more white than grey." She resisted the urge to chuckle at his sudden boyish curiousity.

"It's because they've come in as chunks, instead of peppered throughout. The individual hairs are colourless. Together, they look white. Alone against dark hair, they look grey." Watching his strange behaviour, she wondered if he even remembered his challenge to her.

He was still looking at her hair with his blank expression of intense thought. When he spoke, it was with that lyrical softness that she'd learned meant he expected an answer. "Stress?"

She glanced up through his fingers, and thought about how much to tell him. "I've always had difficulty sleeping," she said, finally. "When I did sleep, I ground my teeth so much that my jaw was always bruised."

He looked startled and intrigued, the pupils of his eyes suddenly contracting. "…I used to grind my teeth."

"It doesn't surprise me. It's common in intelligent children. Usually serious or ambitious ones. And first borns." He was watching her mouth as she spoke. Jennifer tried not to find it distracting. "Most of us it stops around early adolescence. For me, it didn't."

He spoke so quietly she could barely hear him. His hand was heavy and large on her skull. "I was twelve when I started."

It was a loaded statement, but she wasn't sure why. Thankfully, he broke the silence before she had to.

"I don't have greys."

She leaned back, removed herself from under his listlessly probing fingers. He looked at his hand with something like annoyed confusion. "The grinding destroyed my enamel, not my hair. Almost all of my teeth are capped." She could see him considering her mouth again, and shoved away his hand.

She swallowed the surge of self-hatred that came with her remembering her childhood. "It's hard to want to sleep when you know you'll wake up in pain." She ran a finger along the bottom of her front teeth, feeling where her grinding had worn the cap. "So I stopped."

A strong feeling of petulant dislike and Déjà vu. He had taken hold of her chin again, and pulled her face upwards, towards him. His index finger pushed her lip back, and she resisted the urge to bite it. It felt odd and invasive to have ungloved fingers probing her gums.

"Why did you grind your teeth?" An oddly direct question, accompanied by a look of serious reproach. She guessed that he understood the action was usually the result of an underlying issue, rather than an intellectual state.

"Why are you so fucking weird?" she retorted, unwilling. "You're touching my teeth."

"Did your parents treat you badly?"

Another invasive touch, another invasive question. "No. My parents are very good people." She stopped to pull his hand away again, and sighed. There was no help for it. "My brothers are good people, as well. Simple people." She ran her hand down her face, choked by the bile of childhood shame.

He was still looking at her, as expected. She looked over at the moulding that had prepossessed him just minutes earlier. "No one else in my family is particularly bright." A rough stop in her throat, and a sigh. "In fact, you wouldn't be wrong if you said they were… distinctly below average." Her gut lurched inside her, and she buried her face in her palms. "There was no way they could have been prepared for a child like me."

The memory of it was toxic and oppressive, like emotional mustard gas. She was assaulted by bright, unworn images of a grey berber carpet covered in the dismantled pieces of an old computer. She could still hear her father's hushed and fearful conversation with her near-hysterical mother.

The sky outside was the early morning blue of colour just returned to the world, just the same as the dress she'd been wearing. Blue, with red and yellow apples, faded like most second-hand clothes.

She'd grown out of that dress before she hit four.

The greys had started coming, then.

Seto Kaiba was still looking at her with an expression of profound realization.

"We never had very much money. Three kids living off the earnings of a mediocre mechanic and a self-employed maid for hire means you don't have much to spare." She laughed quietly, remembering her mother's shapeless hand-me-down uniform, too much like a public school lunchlady to encourage ideas of hygiene. "By eight I learned to tell my father that a friend's dad had fixed the car for us. He knew better, but he didn't say anything. I didn't have any friends." An old piece of plastic water tubing with a piece of mesh wrapped over one side for a bucket small enough for a child. The wire let the oil and dirt through. "We lived beside a junkyard. It always amazed me, the things that people threw away."

She laughed again, but felt tears on her fingers. "They tried. Really. We moved every time someone got too interested, even though it meant pulling my brothers away from their friends again. And they never blamed me for that."

Her face contorted against her will. "My parents are _still_ terrified of me. They were so happy when I said I was studying in Japan." She drew her legs up to her chest and ground the heels of her palms into her eyes. "For once in their lives, they can tell people that they have a beautiful, intelligent daughter without me _ruining it_."

Jennifer didn't know how she knew that he had moved closer, but she shoved her hand out blindly and pushed him away. "Don't fucking pity me. Don't you dare."

His fingers brushed her bangs aside before disappearing. His voice was soft, but not cold.

"Another time, then."

His bare feet made no sound on the carpet.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

She was leaning against her bed, staring down the missing paint and fresh plaster around where the hinges had been put back in. It was three o'clock on Friday morning. She could hear the owner of the house typing downstairs for the first time in days.

She felt mortified.

"_Every fucking time,_" she muttered to herself in English. "_We talk, and I break down._" She snorted humourlessly. "He probably thinks of me as a failed science project."

It occurred to her then that neither of them had made notes nor started the topic essay that the life-swapping had been introduced for. She tried to motivate herself to care, and had difficulty. She eyed her old laptop with fond distaste.

There really wasn't anything better to do. She finished fifteen rough-draft pages before realizing that the truth was probably the worst thing to tell, and erased eight of them through editing.

Jennifer couldn't help but wonder if the other students were finding the swap as fundamentally disturbing as they were.

_'Probably not.'_

_(You"re So Spoiled!)_

After their last day of school living together, her laptop was missing from her room.

She went on a quest to find it.

It wasn't in Kaiba's study, nor in the living room, kitchen, or front hall. She hesitated with her hand on the doorknob to his room, unwilling to discover what lay within, before deciding that she could check every part of the house before venturing into that particular dark chasm of the unknown.

She found it and him in a library she hadn't realized had existed. He looked up expectantly when she came in.

"I did some editing," he told her informatively.

She glowered back and went to grab it from him. "Ask next time, asshole."

He held it away like a kindergartener playing keep-away. Her arms were unfortunately too short to reach it, even when he was sitting. She looked at the dark red easy-chair he was sitting in with a deep prophetic feeling of dislike.

"Give it to me," she demanded.

He smiled. "You could beg for it."

An internal groan made its way to her mouth and turned into a growl. _'I suppose he didn't forget.'_ She climbed onto the arm of the chair to reach for his wrist and pull it towards her. Instead, his arm pulled her down into the chair, towards him.

For a moment, she was lost, baffled at why her hand was suddenly so much further from her goal.

He looked smug, and pulled her upright by the back of her shirt. She heard a solid thump as he set down her laptop on the floor.

She could feel her face glowering again despite the nervousness being half in his lap was provoking. "What do you want now?"

His smirking face was too close to her own. "You know what I want."

" '_I have no idea what you're talking about_,' " she imitated nastily, before mentally slapping herself for being petty. She could feel the rumble of his laughter more than hear it.

"Isn't that what _you_ want?"

It wasn't herself she wanted to slap now. "You started that," she accused without certainty.

"Did I?"

His eyes were narrow, unreadable. She didn't know what to say. She indulged herself by leaning aggressively close. "Didn't you?"

His chuckle was a puff of laughter on her face. "Did you want me to?"

Jennifer's lips were dry, but she painstakingly resisted the urge to bite them. She was at a loss for words, distracted by that rich familiar spice of cologne and the slow sensation of his lips almost brushing hers.

She fought the auto-shutdown her brain was attempting.

He stopped just short, and wrapped his hand around the back of her neck when she tried to pull back. She struggled against temptation.

"Fuck you," she enunciated carefully, and turned her head to the side. It was a childish act of defiance, but it helped.

His other arm pulled down on her back, dragging her in a partially sprawled straddle of his thighs. His breath was warm on her ear. "Is that what you want?" he asked, teasing.

Her fight to keep synapses firing in the above failed catastrophically when his fingers began to knead circles along the back of her neck. She could feel his lips just below her ear, following the line of her jugular to her collarbone. His teeth depressed the skin below her jaw lightly as he dug fingers into the base of her skull.

Her attempts to reinstate communication between her body and her brain were going sadly unanswered.

She groaned profanities as he bit her more firmly in the crook of her shoulder, pulling her by the waistband of her jeans further into full contact with him. "_Jesus, _fuck. _Vous trichez toujours dans ce jeu. _Shit."

He laughed. "There is no cheating when there are no rules." His body was intensely hot through his clothes. She was starting to sweat.

"I don't even know what you want from me," she said desperately, struggling to keep her hands at her sides. He laughed again, and his hand retreated from her hair.

Kaiba pulled her tight against him by the thighs, his thumbs almost against the line of where her underwear ended between her legs. She could feel her blood pounding somewhere below her twisting stomach.

His cheek was sandpapery, barely stubbled, as it brushed hers. Her skin was on fire.

A wickedly cruel purr starting deep in his throat emerged from his mouth as, "Beg for me." His thumb was stroking downward across the thin, worn grain of her jeans.

She bit her lip and tasted blood. "If I won't?"

She could feel him smiling against her skin. "You will." He dug his teeth into her shoulder hard enough to draw a shriek, but his hands held her hard against him, despite her sudden struggling.

He hadn't broken the skin, but he'd left deep dents. He _had_ broken the spell. She struggled, kicking and clamouring to be away until he let go.

She didn't stop her aimless running until she realized that she knew what he wanted her to beg for.

"Oh my _God_," she muttered, and sat down in the middle of the hall.

Suddenly, the normally welcome prospect of the weekend seemed daunting.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_


	11. Chapter 11

_**Note:**__ Whew. So… this won't be nearly as long as last chapter's note. (Sorry about that. I was deeply upset, and needed to vent.) __**You're So Spoiled!**__ is drawing closer and closer to the explosive… ahem… __**climax**__._

_I couldn't resist._

_And guys… I have an unbelievable amount of people reading and favouriting this (40 people read chapter 10 over __**three**__ days, 23 people have favourited!) yet only my lovely regulars (__**XxpeacefulragexX**__, __**Leh Star**__, __**WandererRaen**__, __**Shantih**__, __**Lightest'Ink**__, __**HieiHeeroRikuSesshoumaruSeto**__, etc.) review with any regularity. (__**3**__) You make me seriously sad, guys. I know you're reading. Don't be scared. I don't bite. _

_**P-Rage**__, it was sorta intended to be funny in a weird, morbid way. I'm glad you laughed!  
__**Leh Star-**__ holy shit, you get really excited when I update and it's awesome._

_**AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY AND INEXPLICABLY DIFFERENT!**_

_Edit: what the fuck I am obviously insane_

_Double-Edit: Apparently, I also have a wide masochistic streak that was previously unbeknownst to me. Somebody needs to throw away the key._

_Yay, more long chapters! FINAL DAY NEXT CHAPTER. ARE. YOU. EXCITED? WHO WILL WIN? LISTEN HERE LISTEN HERE TAKIN' BETS ON THE FINAL SHOWDOWN OF THE SEASON GIT YER TICKETS HEEEERE_

_**Summary:**__ An actually good version of the traditional 'One week at my house, one week at yours' jive assignment. Why? Because it was his fault in the first place. KaibaxOC (Be warned: They're not going to be playing nice.)_

_**Warning:**__ Probable sensuality, innuendos, and sexual tension. Oh, and psychopathic hatred._

_Edit: And crudity. Lots and lots of crudity._

_**Disclaimer: **__I didn't kill Gozaburo. Kazuki Takahashi did._

_You're So Spoiled!_

_Chapter Eleven_

She hadn't slept.

She never slept.

It was Saturday.

Jennifer was feeling exceptionally twitchy.

She had sat in her room all night, between the bed and the bedstand, wrapped to the nose in her comforter. At some point earlier, it had occurred to her that if she were to drift off or pass out on her bed, she would be in an exceedingly vulnerable position.

_'Night attacks,'_ she thought, still clutching the blankets to her face with a bizarre sort of intensity. Her eyes darted under the bed, paranoid. _'He could be waiting for me under there. Waiting for a breach in my defenses, a head above the trench._

She wriggled her toes under the blankets, half-expecting a hand to dart out like the paw of a cat. She giggled too loudly to herself at the thought of it, and huddled closer to the bedstand, still staring down the spot where the soft, expensive carpet met the long shadows of the boxspring.

Her stomach growled. She ducked her head under and looked at it with a feeling of profound speculation and deep camaraderie.

"It's a recon mission," she told her stomach with utmost seriousness. "We may not make it back alive." She poked back out of her comforting comforter fortress, assessing the battleground.

She scooted forward, using her toes to pull her along the floor. The blanket was dragging on the carpet with an eerie _hush, hush_. She slowly made her way around the bed and towards the door. Only her eyes and hair were visible, the turret on her blanket tank, the periscope on the duvet submarine.

The doorframe drew closer as her treads navigated the harsh wasteland of Northern Transylvania. She regarded the wall's old battlescars with fond remembrance. She had won the day, refusing her position as a prisoner of war.

Today, she would use her elite knowledge of guerilla tactics to slip unnoticed through enemy lines in search of rations.

Another battle won.

She gained the hall with ease, only to discover the next greatest barrier.

The Great Draculian Stairs of Southern Transylvania, cold, steep and forbidding. "Your perimeter defenses are strong, my foe," she whispered, casting around for enemy units. Slowly, she emerged a hand from her moving fortress to grip the vertical rail.

It was a long and arduous descent, but she reached the bottom intact and triumphant.

But the ice flats of Southern Transylvania were smooth, difficult to grip with her toes, hard and icy on her thighs.

She transformed into an all-terrain high-camouflage vehicle, folding over onto her special mission _kneecap-tread_s and shifting the blankets over her head until only a slit of daylight shone through. Further triumph. _'I have prepared myself for your icy disposition, my foe.'_

The enemy's larder grew closer. It had been left open, undefended. The icy ground shone like a runway, beckoning her inside, leading the way to victory.

Too late, voices rose, one high, one low and familiar. They cut out abruptly.

She had been discovered.

Jennifer kept still in the hopes that, like wild beasts, they would grow accustomed to her presence, and cease to notice it.

It was not to be.

As she peeked out, her nemesis himself had drawn close.

His voice rumbled like thunder. "Very cute, Nauswell. Stand up."

She scooted sideways, crab-style, across the floor. She could hear high giggling from the other side of the room. Her foe followed her with giant steps, looming high above. His hand reached down, the one bomb to breach her impenetrable defense.

She countered with her own, slapping the bomb's trajectory aside. "DEFLECTION," she asserted loudly. There was a more pronounced bout of giggling within earshot.

Her foe looked disgusted. "Ugh. What are you on now?"

She lowered her head-covering to meet his challenge. "Your accusation offends me, sir."

Bemusement, coupled with annoyance. Definite laughter in the background.

"Nauswell, what the hell are you doing?"

She narrowed her eyes at him, refusing to relinquish her tenuous hold on the no-man's-land. "I come to procure rations, _demonlord_. I shall not allow your interference in this matter. _En garde!_"

He stepped back hastily from the sudden protusion of a flailing leg. Her flailing leg.

Kaiba's expression dissolved into a multitude of emotions.

Amongst them were: Bafflement, Bewilderment, Astonishment, Befuddlement, Speechlessness and Flabbergastian.

Someone was laughing uproariously.

Her foe looked over his shoulder hastily. "Mokuba, go take a shower. Or do your homework."

"Bu-"

"_Now._"

The Jennifer tank herself was giggling despite the amber alarm danger. She drew further under her protective covering when he squatted in front of her.

He was eying her _blanketank _with uncertainty. She wondered distantly if she had shocked her foe in coherency despite their mutual insomnia.

Kaiba ran a hand over his face and then pointed at her.

"Nauswell… are you naked under that?"

She ducked down further, fortifying the area around and under her feet. "I am also requisitioning your laundry facilities."

He stared at her, speechless, seemingly stunned despite their somewhat torrid competition. He pinched the bridge of his nose, opening his mouth to speak and then closing it with a snap. He shook his head at nothing, eyebrows furrowed to an extreme.

Finally, he stood and left without a word.

Jennifer punched both arms in the air, letting the blanket fall loose around her waist.

_"VICTORY!"_

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

She couldn't help but wonder if he had turned to look. A triumphant scream wasn't something heard in the Kaiba manor often.

She assumed.

She had mortified herself again, but was having difficulty feeling guilty about it. Despite the vulnerable and somewhat suggestive position she'd put herself in, the bizarreness of her behaviour appeared to have caused a thoughtful retreat.

If there was one thing she was grateful for, it was the fact that she hadn't seen or heard him in hours.

His little brother, however, occasionally poked his head into the living room curiously, obviously wanting to know more. She considered inviting him to sit with her, but was unsure how much he knew about the situation or if he would try to affect it.

After some thought, she realized that the kid was barely fourteen and unlikely to be in his reticent brother's confidence.

The next time he poked his head in, she smiled and patted the couch amicably. "I'm wearing clothes, I swear."

His brother's clothes. Very big clothes. Oppressively huge clothes. She didn't think it was important.

He minced in with every appearance of excitement.

"I'm Mokuba," he told her with a force that surprised her. His eyes were almost black, and they glittered with a cheerful personal transparency that was too charming to resist.

She could see a very marked family resemblance, and gambled that when the baby fat fell away, he and his brother would look remarkably alike.

Aside from the wild hair. She suddenly vividly remembered seeing him in Kaiba's study.

She laughed. She couldn't help it.

"I'm Jennifer Nauswell." Another pat on the couch. "Come sit." He didn't need to be asked twice.

"My brother _never_ has girls over!" Almost a blurt. Everything he said was too enthusiastic to determine tone. "He never has _anyone_ interesting here!" Definitely a blurt. "Or young! And he won't tell me who you are! Who are you? Are you classmates? Why are you here?"

His rapidfire questioned slowed in intensity and speed as she raised her hands in defense. For the first time, the boy looked somewhat embarrassed. It was cute. She decided that she liked him. He reminded her of somebody, but she couldn't think of whom.

"Easy, Mokuba," she said amicably. "From the top: I'm Jennifer Nauswell. Kaiba and I are classmates. He got us roped into-" She stopped, a little ashamed, and opted for what she knew was the truth. "Our teacher assigned our class a law assignment that involved observing and adopting a classmate's lifestyle for a week. It was supposed to be same-sex assignment, like most, but… ah, well." She ran a hand through her hair, still struggling with the urge to talk trash. "We fight too much. So… we got put together." She glanced over at the dark-haired boy. He looked astounded.

"You fight?"

She frowned. Not the question she had been expecting. "Yeah. You couldn't tell?" She laughed a little, recalling that morning. "I ran around his house at six in nothing but a blanket, so starved that I had myself convinced that I was hollow and therefore a war machine. That sort of… _thing_ doesn't exactly fly well with your brother."

Mokuba smiled suddenly, broadly and crookedly. It bore an uncanny resemblance to his brother's, except devoid of malicious intent. It felt strange to look at.

"I haven't seen him laugh that hard since we left the orpha…"

He trailed off, and his face fell into a sort of desperate flatness that she had seen before.

_"I was twelve when I started."_

A loaded statement. She remembered it. This was another one, and she couldn't deduce why. She assumed it had something to do with the reason a fourteen and eighteen-year-old boy were living seemingly completely without adult supervision.

She reached for him instinctively. He responded immediately, leaning his hand into her hand like a dog and smiling with a look of immediate comfort that she couldn't explain.

A huge realization bloomed in her brain like a daylily.

_'It's the hands. The touching.'_

Hands, reaching, pushing, prodding, forcing her to look up, to show her face, to bare her teeth.

_'It's not just me.'_

Hands on her chin, her wrists, and her hair.

She suddenly understood with almost dizzying, shameful clarity.

_'It was never meant to be mocking or invasive.'_

She hugged the young teen in one arm lightly, and while he looked embarrassed, he also looked grateful. He smiled a little and straightened up. "Ah, sorry. So if you fight a lot, how are you going to write a report?" Genuine curiousity, and a desire to get back on comfortable topics.

The report had become another uncomfortable topic without her realizing. The budding bruise on her shoulder burned into response. She could suddenly, overwhelmingly, taste coffee. Her face was the center of a heatwave. Mokuba looked concerned.

She spoke without thinking.

"Has your brother always been such a handsy dude?"

It had come out wrong, completely wrong, but the words twisted in her mouth like snakes unwilling to escape the warmth, and Mokuba's eyebrows shot up in a look of such surprise that she wasn't sure it ever wouldn't have been a strange question.

The boy was considering her with a very illuminated expression. "He touches you?"

Another loaded question. Another question that bordered on a double-entendre.

And she couldn't even truthfully say 'no' to either.

She settled on "It's not like that."

Mokuba's secretive smile was widening. "Of course not." He looked much too old and too much like his brother with such a self-satisfied smirk. She resisted the urge to stick out her tongue at him and failed.

"It's _not_. Your brother hates my guts." She compiled the reasons. "I threatened to menstruate on his floor less than two weeks ago. Also I broke some hinges. And drank his cooking sherry."

The last one was probably too much information, but she had already said it.

Mokuba looked more amused than anything else. "But he touches you."

She grumbled. "If anything, I'm his favourite lab rat. It's always seemed like more of a clinical checkup thing than what _you're_ thinking." Maybe a lie. Slightly. More of a bent truth. She gave the boy a narrow look. "And why _are_ you so interested in things like that, hmm? To do with your brother, no less?"

She had defused him. His face flushed abruptly and he clammed up. She ruffled his hair, laughing.

"I'm just teasing, kid. Calm down. Now- your brother tells me you have an interest in video games…"

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

The kid was asleep on the couch, and his brother hadn't bothered them the couple of times he had wandered in to check on the proceedings. Night had fallen, and Sunday was fast approaching.

The last day of the project and of the bet.

She looked at the budding teen with sad affection.

He was a Monopoly _Get Out of Jail_ card for not being harassed by Kaiba, but it felt wrong to use him like one. It felt cowardly. She didn't think she could stay resiliently by his side for the next thirty-six hours, though she knew she was able to. He had taken a shine to her, and would've responded to the suggestion with euphoric joy.

It was obvious that the kid was lonely. She couldn't think of another reason a bright boy like him could enjoy her company so much.

She rose, and tucked the blanket she'd been wearing earlier around him. The doorway to the main room was black and looming.

She hated crossing the foyer. Of all the places in the house, it was the most Transylvanian. It was also the most difficult to navigate in the dark, but she had difficulty admitting her own inelegance.

Jennifer stepped onto the cold marble with a shiver. She knew where she was going. Left staircase, third level. She felt like she could manage it.

Sudden warmth on her shoulder. She whirled.

Even in the dark, Seto Kaiba's eyes had an unsettling reflective luminousity, like a snake's. Light blue, with that shattered glass effect, catching the tiniest bit of light. She wondered vaguely how long he had been standing there.

His hand was lingering on her skin, where the undershirt- the closest thing to a t-shirt he seemed to own- had slipped off one bony shoulder. His finger was lightly tracing the outlines of two crescents- the bruise he had given her. She wondered how he could even see. The only light that filtered through the large windows was from the street lamps far below, at the end of the driveway.

Just enough light to make out the contours of his face, and the details of those overbright eyes.

And the fact that he wasn't wearing a shirt.

She turned away hurriedly, feeling the heat surge to her face again. She understood that the game was almost up, and that she was winning, and that that had to be a motivator to the ever-reluctant to lose Seto Kaiba, but his strange variations of childish, inoffensive inquisitiveness had put her off.

She didn't know what to expect anymore.

His fingers were brushing up the side of her throat again, all exploratory thumbs.

_"He touches you?"_

It always returned to that expression of total surprise, coupled with the undertone of nervous excitement that she had teased him about. The combination that had said _This is not a usual occurrence._

She shivered, and shuffled flat-footed along the floor, reminding herself that her classmate hadn't slept in almost a week. She heard him chuckle quietly in the dark, and turned to look. It was fundamentally disturbing being unable to locate him.

"I have terrible night vision," she muttered, and continued to shuffle towards the stairs. She could hear him walking close behind her because of the muted echo it had produced, but every nervous glance backwards produced only one thing: Another quiet, whispering laugh.

She couldn't help but wonder if it was unlike being haunted.

Before she mounted the stairs, she felt a warm hand suddenly slip under her shirt, around her waist. It was a brief, almost affectionate squeeze, a moment of fingers tickling along her hipbone, but before she could react, the hand had withdrawn.

She stood, stilt-like, casting around in the dark for him with outstretched hands, more anxious than angry but unwilling to show her indecision. "Kaiba?" she called, frustrated. _'This is so unfair.'_

The side of her palm hit the railing and she clung to it and felt her way up the steps.

The relief she felt when she reached the landing was shortly supplanted by abruptly slamming her face into something warm and hard and having her jaw gripped before she could even rub her aching nose.

She could taste coffee again and feel fingers in her hair, but it wasn't gentle. The hand had twisted tight against her scalp and the mouth was almost bruising, pressing and withdrawing and biting lightly with such insistency that she nearly backed off the landing and sent herself tumbling back down onto the Transylvanian marble three floors below. Her hands didn't know what to do and struck out blindly like clubs against the mysterious force that had accosted her, only to find themselves caught by theother hand and pulled aside.

She could feel the heat of his body through the dark. She could almost smell the dark, malicious _want_.

When he did let her go, it was suddenly, and she listed forward onto the carpet with a _whuff _of lost air. She looked up to see nothing but a thin line of yellow light escaping from his room across the hall.

She recognized it for what it was: An invitation.

Her bruise bitterly protested her pressing two fingers hard into it, but it yanked her back off of the edge. Her blood was pounding again. She wanted to dig her fingernails into his back with such a bitter, hateful intensity that she was ashamed of herself. The degree of insinuative persuasion that thin strip of light was having on her dignity made her both angry and bitterly impressed.

She thought back to what Mokuba had implied and let out a hard laugh before tottering back to her own room.

_"There's always free cheddar in the mousetrap,"_ she reminded herself.

It was quickly becoming a mantra.

_'Just one more day, Jennifer.'_

_(You're So Spoiled!)_


	12. Chapter 12

_**Note:**_ _DUN DUN DUN DUN DUUUUN. Whilst not the final chapter, this __**is**__ the final day of the assignment and of the challenge. Have you placed your bets? Are the stakes high enough to have you gripping your seat? Could you handle Jennifer losing her dignity, or could you stand never knowing the truth of it all?_

_And what will happen_

_after shit goes down, however it goes down?_

_LAST CALL FO' BETS, PEOPLE._

_Edit: B'aww, so many reviews so fast last chapter. I feel so warm and fuzzy, you guys. New faces, too! And __**WandererRaen**__, you totally called me out on my Les Mis reference. (Pretty much all I could do not to put to put 'one day more' instead of 'one more day'.)_

_Double-Edit: I have never loved anyone more than I love Jennifer. She just grabs me by the throat and __**does**__ things._

_Triple-Edit: 'Scuse me, hyperventilating._

_**Summary:**__ An actually good version of the traditional 'One week at my house, one week at yours' jive assignment. Why? Because it was his fault in the first place. KaibaxOC (Be warned: They're not going to be playing nice.)_

_**Warning:**__ Probable sensuality, innuendos, and sexual tension. Oh, and psychopathic hatred._

_Edit: And crudity. Lots and lots of crudity._

_**Disclaimer: **__I didn't kill Gozaburo. Kazuki Takahashi did._

_You're So Spoiled!_

_Chapter Twelve_

She buried herself in layers of warm, fresh clothes. It was her first line of defense. The house was cold enough to allow it- almost encouraging it, even.

She paused in picking up the undershirt she'd found in the laundry room. Kaiba's shirt. She hesitated before folding it lightly and put it in the corner with Kaiba's suit jacket and her borrowed pajama pants of more ambiguous origins.

She had difficulty picturing Kaiba in pajamas. He'd slept almost fully clothed at her home. She'd never thought about it before, but somewhere in the back of her skull, there was an assumption that he slept nude.

She avoided that subject hastily, just glad to be back on speaking terms with her subconscious.

It felt good to be overdressed, a strange sensation for her. Her normal interests tended to run towards the _less is more_ principle.

Now, being smothered in shirts and sweaters and shorts and pants all at once, she was having flashbacks to her _blanketank_ attack strategy. Jennifer smiled to herself. All things considered, it hadn't been a bad tactic, even if it was a crazy one. It had earned her a retreat, a new friend, and a temporary sanctuary.

Things could have ended much worse than they had, but not much better.

And now they had come to the final day.

She was having difficulty imagining going home after school the next day. She had been at his home for almost nine days- a bizarre stipulation of the assignment was that it spanned the first weekend to the third, presumably to allow the partners two days to work together on the finished project- and her memory of the week before was a hazy fog of fear and hate and speaking in tongues. "_Yr wyf am i chi wthio i lawr a mi gael rhyw gyda mi_, Seto Kaiba," she murmured to herself, and then laughed. It was more than a little risqué to say that in any language, but one that had barely left the island it was born on was probably still the safest for combining frankness and secrecy.

She wondered if she would be able to go home without looking nervously at the still folded-out futon in expectation. It was too easy to think about the way the light came through the curtains.

The final day. The sixteenth day of the assignment. The last day of the challenge. Half a month dedicated to simultaneously tormenting and ignoring each other had piled up into the two of them battling for and against the one reason the teacher had allowed their partnership.

_ The teacher's face, mouth bitterly protesting too quietly. Her own hard laughter echoing in her ears. The light was too stark, too bright, too many eyes on her._

_"Besides, what're you afraid of? That we're going to have sex or something?"_

She could have slapped her past self at that moment for her cheek. It had been a bad day; she had been groggy, short-tempered and angry from depressant overuse.

Her inability to hold her tongue was the reason she was there, in his home, swaddling herself in clothes like the baby Jesus.

She couldn't deny it any longer. She was too sober.

_'This is all my fault.' _Grumpiness overtook her. _'I could've been eating grilled fish and rice with Anzu or Miho right now, with only a slight increase in how insane everyone that school thinks I am.' _She had to reach under layers of clothes to scratch her darkening bruise. It was annoying. _'Now I've reached a level of infamy I didn't even know was possible.'_

There was no missing the fearful and curious awe her schoolmates felt. It was palpable, like bad air. She felt grateful at least that the pressure to join the nerd group would lessen, even if these tumultuous two weeks followed her past the end of the semester.

Something horrible occurred to her. She raised fingers to her mouth.

It was so easy to forget that her housemate was a celebrity in his own right, despite his expansive house.

_'What if someone sells us out to the media?'_

Even if the details weren't true, she'd seen the frenzied interest the Japanese press could stir up when it came to him, reprinting news from years before, resurfacing speculation on an old topic of some dead old man, poking and prodding until the headlines were bald speculations of murder.

She didn't take stock in their credibility and hadn't read them, but she wasn't stupid enough to realize that the truth would probably be more titillating than fiction in the case of the two of them.

_'No whirlwind romance is we,'_ she thought, amused by herself. The media did love a dramatic feeding frenzy.

_'Good thing I edited out parts of that paper.'_

She shook herself. Whatever the future, she still had to manage the events of today. She pulled on her thickest socks.

Something else, better, occurred to her. It had been impossible when she was being monitored. She sat up straight, mouth ajar.

_'I can go __**outside**__.'_

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

The trees were glorious, and she hadn't even known they were there.

There was a large, well-manicured and tasteful garden by the house, delicately disguising the security features of the yard with lustrous ferns and lending a grotto appeal to the salt water pool with trailing vines on the marble overhangs that barely touched the water and created intimate crevices to hide in.

She didn't like it. It was very staid, like young children dressed in Sunday suits. It was lifeless, unhappy.

Through the garden, she found a door with rusted hinges.

Through the now-broken door, she found the trees.

The smell of apples made her long for home.

They were very obviously untended. She hadn't known apples to thrive in the area, but the trees had sent out looping roots and low, sweeping branches so far into themselves that the sky was a lattice of sunlight through green leaves. Here and there, flashes of ripe yellow. She'd thought it was past season, but the sharp smell of the overripe apples on the ground was heady enough to assure her that they were fresh.

The air was too warm, too still, like standing water. It was too hot for her safety under the trees, so she shed her safety, throwing the once-fresh clothes in a pile by the gate. It was stupid, and she knew it, but the liquid smell of apples filled her with a sense of euphoria that she held in desperately, afraid it would evaporate with the moisture of an ecstatic scream.

The air was warm on her bare legs. A fallen apple crushed between the toes of her left foot sent up a spray of olfactory sound.

She ran without thinking. It didn't occur to her that she could get lost. The trees were endless, wonderful, safe in their own right. _'This is an Eden,' _she thought, and skidded in fallen leaves.

A big tree. An old tree, with low branches, and leaves she didn't recognize. It was instinct, barely thought out. She scraped her bare knees climbing it, had to hike up her underwear and disentangle her shirt. Her knuckles were as raw as where the old bark had fallen free.

It was like climbing a mountain. The air grew colder as the scaled it. She felt the dizzying height of a sudden breeze unknown to the ground below. She burst up through the tree branches to marvel at the sky.

She could see one cloud, dour and grey as a soaked cotton ball. She laughed at it despite the cold it had brought, because she couldn't imagine how it could challenge the whole of the endless, bright blue sky.

The tree had slight warmth to it, and she leaned against it, enjoying the rough and gentle textures of bark and moss. It was old and primal, and she felt that they had an amicable understanding.

She heard thunder from the ground below.

The tree branches were too sparse in their old age to either hide her or block her own sight. When she looked, she could see Kaiba walking cautiously around the fallen apples with her shed clothes in one hand and her lost shoes in the other. She giggled as he called her, huddling closer to the tree.

_"__Aidez-moi à cacher, mon ami!"_ she whispered to it, clinging to the bark. Her hair was pulling free of her braid in whorls that obscured her vision like leaves of her own. He called her again.

"Nauswell, I know you're here." It was stern, but also concerned.

"So little faith in my sanity," she murmured to herself. A branch from a nearby tree caught a whorl of hair. There was an apple within reach, so sunny and yellow she couldn't imagine how she'd missed it. It popped off of its stem with a satisfying crack.

She dropped it on him.

It fell perfectly, so beautifully that she couldn't help but marvel, directly into her left shoe, rolling forward against the tongue. He dropped her shoes in shock before looking upwards.

She smiled at him and tucked her legs together in a vague thought about decency.

He was puzzled again, but almost smiling.

She could smell it, like the apples.

"Come down, Nauswell. What are you doing up there?"

She didn't bother to think about her answer. "I'm cheering on the little grey cloud," she told him. She wondered how she was going to get down.

This time, he did smile, albeit a little pompously. "You want it to rain?" Getting down was a difficult proposition.

She needed to _go down_, so she followed her previous initiative with the apple.

She dropped herself.

The leaves were surprisingly soft, and caught her with an enthusiastic _whumph_. The air was still gloriously warm on the ground. She looked up at her housemate from where she'd landed.

"Of course I want it to rain. I want it to _pour_."

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

It _was_ pouring, but he had forbidden her from going outside.

She felt like a little girl again.

The evening was pulling in on them, and he hadn't tried anything. She struggled to quelch a feeling of triumph, but as midnight grew closer hour by hour, she felt the hand on her lungs relaxing its hold.

She knew better than to relax completely. She felt that she knew Kaiba well enough to assume that there would be one last _push_- the biggest, hardest, most determined surge of energy- before the time was up, but it was hard not to maintain her state of euphoria.

She had already managed him for two weeks. Sixteen days of Seto Kaiba, and she'd never given in to locks, hinges, or fingergrips.

The rain made her feel immensely powerful.

_'I have challenged the sky and won.'_

Kaiba's idyllic garden pool was its own isolated sea, complete with monsters below.

Her little grey cloud had blossomed into a torrential scream of icy water and black lightening. It had swallowed every inch of blue in the sky in a cosmic gulp. She wanted to go out and celebrate their victories.

She shook herself again.

Uncontrolled, unmedicated, she tended to lose herself. She needed to reminded herself where she was or risk showing weakness when she couldn't afford to.

She pressed her palms against the window for a moment and felt the thunder reverberate joyfully through the glass. It made her happy in a very simple way. _'Et tu, mon ami.'_

She heard hinges creak behind her, and turned. The study was the back room of the bottom floor, one wall a massive picture window, opening out to the garden. Kaiba was standing in the open door, watching her, a hand still on the doorknob.

He was silent, considering her carefully.

The ground rumbled. There was a breath of silence. The air flashed behind her. Ecstatic, powerful joy pushed her lungs against her ribcage, up against her heart.

"It really did rain," Kaiba told her, deadpan.

She smiled, breathless. "Of course."

He didn't sound amused. There was a note of frustration in his voice. "It isn't raining because you wanted it to, Nauswell."

She couldn't help herself. She laughed, gasping against the pressure on her spine, and looked back outside. "Of course not. But it rained."

Deep, clinical annoyance. "There is nothing special about a rainstorm, Nauswell. Only inconvenient."

She laughed again, whooping as the ground shook tremors through her body. "You have…_ no idea_ how wrong you are." She turned to look over her shoulder at him, and saw he was still hovering by the door. Jennifer wondered if he was nervous. "Don't be afraid. Come here. Come look."

His lips were pressed tightly a line. A flash of forked lightening sent sparks into his eyes, and he winced. "It's just rain," he seethed.

The pressure broke out through her mouth in a hiss of euphoria.

"Nothing is ever _just _what it is." The glass itself was shivering in sympathy. "There is no such thing." The static and water in the air made her hair cling to her glasses, to her cheeks. "Everything is more than inconvenience!" It came out like a rumble, carried by the thunder. She laughed again. "See? Even the storm agrees."

Kaiba looked angry, but he was still clinging to the door. "It can't agree with you!" he snarled. "All that is water, air and electricity. It isn't alive! Come back inside."

She threw up her hands at his demanding tone. The triumph had burst into her brain like fireworks. "We are all water, air and electricity! Everything is math," she told him, unable to refuse her own smile. The thunder shuddered in her bones. "Everything is life. Even fire is only a hydrogen allergy away from being life. Life is just water and electricity supporting carbon impurities. When you die, all you will be is water and electricity!"

The air was static, still and charged for just a moment. "Don't be afraid of things just because they're more powerful than you." It came out as a breathless whisper. She could still feel shivering reverberations in her skull. The rain was sheering against the glass like pounding hands. "You will still outlive the storm."

The flash lit up the room, and his face. There was a strange expression she couldn't place on it, a sort of expressive flatness and tentative wonder. She chuckled at him.

"You can't be afraid of the rain, Seto Kaiba," she teased. "It's too fundamental. There's a little rain in all of us."

The side of his mouth pulled outwards, still part of that strange expression. He looked like he was about to curse. He said something that was swallowed by the thundering before he drew back from the door.

It sounded like, "Some of us more than others."

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

It was fifteen minutes to eleven.

The storm still raged outside, but the adrenaline had subsided in her, and she felt guilty. It was obvious to her that he had been concerned about her proximity to the glass; he had been concerned about the possibility of it shattering on her. The winds outside were formidable. It was a valid fear.

She was wandering the halls of the third floor, unsure of what she was looking for. The lights were off, and once again she was navigating in the dark. She gripped a doorknob in her hand before the smoothness of the metal told her it wasn't hers. She'd scraped and scuffed hers in her last escape.

She knew the handle she was holding because she suddenly knew where she was. She'd taken the staircase on right side of the foyer instead of the left.

Kaiba's room was the same number of doors down from the end on the opposite side of the hall as hers was on the other side. It had an appealing sort of diagonal symmetry.

Her fingers lingered on the cold metal.

It was the last night. As far as she knew, she would never again have the chance to know. Her curiousity was overwhelming, and had been from the first day.

She wanted to know what was inside that room. The rest of his home spoke highly of itself in a very shallow way. It communicated wealth, but nothing else.

She wanted to know what was _inside_, where he had no choice but to leave behind traces of himself.

Jennifer pressed her ear to the door, listening, but the drumbeat tattoo of rain outside drowned out all of the small noises of an old home. She considered, chewing her lip. Her curiousity had a nagging insistency to the tune of '_There's a chance he won't be inside.'_

She gave in to her worst sins.

She cursed and gambled.

Inside was dark. It wasn't as big as she'd expected, but it was still a large room. Something in the back of her brain was surprised to see the ceiling. Only the lighting was draconian.

Heavy drapes were pulled across the window, but the little light they let through revealed nothing. She couldn't see him.

She sinned and gambled again, stepping inside.

The simplicity of the room surprised her. The bed was spacious but unadorned, neatly made under a dark comforter. The nightstand, desk and dresser were all made of the same fine-grain wood, simple, heavy, well-made and mathematical things. The back wall was all high bookshelves, jammed full of books and folders and paperclipped hard copies from floor to ceiling. It was a room more full of work than his office.

There was a flat rectangular mirror with no frame mounted on the wall above the dresser. She rounded the dresser to look into it.

His arm had looped around her waist before she could even shriek, let alone turn.

Instead, she let out a strangled_ whuff_ of air, too startled to remember she had vocal chords. She could see him behind her in the mirror, and feel his chest against her back.

He was looking at her person instead of her reflection, and the mirror image of the exposed side of his face was hidden under his hair. She felt his breath on her neck, but couldn't bring herself to turn. There was something both strangely distant and inescapably intimate about seeing that bare arm over the folds of her shirt in the mirror.

She tried to say something, and it came out as another strangled, peculiar noise. She felt him laugh.

"Why are you in my room?"

His voice was shivering her bones like the thunder. In the glass, she could see his lips moving close to her ear. Her reflection looked startled and lost.

She didn't know what to say.

His hand pushed under the hem of her shirt, tracing the top of her jeans across her hips. His other hand had found its way under and up, a thumb pushing over her diaphragm and against the wire and cloth joining the two halves of her bra.

She recognized what she had walked into.

This was the final push.

"You-" she started, but he laughed again, hooking his thumb under the wire. She could feel the calloused side of his thumb between her breasts, his fingers against the bottom of her bra. The rest of her sentence came out as strangled as everything else. Her blood was starting to pound in her stomach.

"If you ask me to, I will stop."

His teasing whisper infuriated her because it knewwhat she knew, and she knew that she was starting to feel helpless. She opened her mouth and closed it again. The words weren't coming. They weren't there. The _want _had stolen them from her lips with a giggle and a wink. The fingers of his right had pushed lightly under the waistband of her jeans, feeling along the elastic of her underwear. She ground her teeth, keeping her arms at her sides.

His nose bumped where her jaw met her ear. He was almost enveloping her in the mirror. There was pressure in her lungs again. She could barely breathe. His breath tickled the hair on her neck.

"If you don't ask me to keep going, I won't."

She found her voice, barely containing a hard laugh of disbelief. "What the hell do you want, then?"

Hot skin of bare stomach against her back where her shirt had ridden up, around her waist, hot skin on an arm, warming the rounds of her cold hips. Hair was tickling her throat. His voice rumbled deep in his chest.

"Beg for me."

_Want_. Inescapable, undeniable, irresistible _want_. _Want _had crossed its arms and dug its feet into the sides of her throat, shoving down her protests, knocking aside the profanities that usually came so naturally. His lips were grazing her throat again. She felt his teeth on her neck, but more gently, almost teasing. He was careful around her bruise.

His fingers were drawing light circles on the skin above her pubic bone.

She managed a drawn-out curse. He chuckled again.

"Did you want me to stop?"

She ground her tongue hard enough against her teeth to taste copper. _"Weithiau mae'n gas gen i chi gymaint."_

The sound he made was not unlike a low purr of satisfaction. His reflection leaned close. She could see the expressive half-smile on his lips; feel the purr in his lungs. _"Nid ydych yn casáu mi."_

_ 'You don't hate me.'_

Her life suddenly felt incredibly surreal.

"That's not fair," she told him, at a loss for anything else to say. Her unconscious was buzzing static again except for a vague and incredulous _'Is this what he was doing instead of sleeping?'_

She didn't need to see all of his face to tell that he was beyond pleased with himself. Unfortunately, she found herself still too dumbstruck to do anything but stare at her equally puzzled-looking mirror image.

His hand pushed under her bra surreptitiously. It was colder than she'd realized. She hissed air in through her teeth, twitching. The rain was suddenly pounding again in her ears, instead of below her gut, where his fingers were playing their tracing game of circles and squares. He hummed again, obviously feeling self-satisfied.

His body felt like it was boiling with heat.

Her body felt like melting wax.

She turned her face away from the mirror, towards the covered window, where the rain was still knocking. _"__Aidez-moi à cacher, mon ami, s'il vous plait," _she muttered again without thinking.

His fingers paused in their explorations. _"Cachez-vous de moi?" _His teeth pushed too hard against her bruise. She bit back a yelp. He buried his nose and mouth in the crook of her shoulder.

His skin was so warm. The _want_ in her throat was pushing to meet it.

The hands of her reflection were half-raised, half-balled, still as a mannequin's. The woman she could see in the mirror was biting her lip into whiteness, back arched against someone who still had the thumb of his right hand resting on top of waistband of her jeans.

She was listing perilously away from reality.

Kaiba was back between her jaw and her shoulder. His nose traced up the line of her jugular. His cheek brushed her ear.

She could see almost the whole of his face in the mirror, but he was still looking down, over, at her.

"Beg for me."

She hissed in a breath between her teeth and felt him laugh. She turned back to the window. The hand under her bra had warmed against her skin, but it disappeared from under her shirt.

He turned her face back to the mirror. His eyes were still almost closed, the barest glint of pale blue visible under those dark eyelashes. She realized he was watching her lips again.

"Beg for me."

The _want_ was stretching and moaning against her vocal cords. Her jaw hurt from clenching. Her mouth felt dry.

She could see those eyes, those _unbelievable eyes_, under his eyelashes. It occurred to her that nothing else in the room was blue.

His voice was too soft, too smooth. It was his _answer me_ voice.

"Beg for me."

She broke, spitting up the _want_ onto her tongue instead of swallowing it like she'd meant to.

"I don't know _how_."

It came out hoarse, like she'd been coughing. A surge of unbelievable shame and embarrassment hit her. She wanted to cover her face with her hands, but couldn't. His fingers were feeling along the bone of her jaw.

His cheek, the side of his nose, still leaning against her ear. A definite, definable and visible expression of indulged pleasure on those half-smiling, barely parted lips.

"Tell me what it is you want."

The _want _had already borrowed into her tongue like a parasite.

She told him.

It was five minutes past eleven on the last day.

Jennifer Nauswell had lost the game.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_


	13. Chapter 13

_**Note:**_ _I bought a seven-pound bag of old keys from an antique shop on Thursday. Why? Because I have an insane fascination with keys and locks and old things._

_I never thought I'd make it this far in this story. I thought about everything I wanted to happen, but I assumed I'd jam like a schoolhouse pencil sharpener, like I always do. But here we are. Drawing closer and closer to the end. _

_Woah._

_Will this be the first quality piece of fanfiction I complete?_

_Edit: Um, thank you, anonymous reviewer, for taking the time to review just to tell about someone else's great puppyshipping story._

_Wait, what?_

_Double-Edit: OFFICIALLY PAST THE REVIEW COUNT OF __**White Alice**__. And, with this chapter: PAST THE WORD COUNT, TOO! Almost at the big forty thou point._

_Triple-Edit: Excuse me, I have to quietly foam at the mouth and convulse in the corner over here to express my excitement at the return of steadfast anonymous reviewer __**Doesn't Matter**__. _

_I think I may have pooped a little._

_Quad-Ed: Holy crap, this chapter alone has 13 reviews. I feel so loooooooved. I love all of you so much! Thank you! You're so wonderful. (And so good to me.)_

_Nth-Edit: Why am I always such a bad person?_

_**Summary:**__ An actually good version of the traditional 'One week at my house, one week at yours' jive assignment. Why? Because it was his fault in the first place. KaibaxOC (Be warned: They're not going to be playing nice.)_

_**Warning:**__ Probable sensuality, innuendos, and sexual tension. Oh, and psychopathic hatred._

_Edit: And crudity. Lots and lots of crudity._

_**Disclaimer: **__I didn't kill Gozaburo. Kazuki Takahashi did. _

_You're So Spoiled!_

_Chapter Thirteen_

Given room, he slept on his back.

It didn't really surprise her. His aggressive, confident attitude didn't strike her as superficial. It was just how he was.

Pushy. Rude. Maybe a little bit of meddler. Kind of like an old woman, sometimes, too interested in poking his nose into her business.

But she couldn't really bring herself to hate him.

And he looked good when he was sleeping.

Especially when he was sleeping naked.

Jennifer Nauswell dressed and watched the sun rise through a gap in the curtains. It hurt to sit, because sitting put pressure on the yellowing and purple bruises on her hips and thighs. Her shoulder ached. His preference for certain accessible spots had worsened the old bruise from green to black.

Her resentment was negligible. She didn't want to see what his back looked like.

She was still finding scraps of skin under her nails, and something she assumed- the laziest form of hope- was dirt.

For once, she was glad her subconscious was just buzzing. She didn't really want to feel anything but slight annoyance at her own discomfort, or embarrassment when tugging neckline of her shirt back in.

She did have a terrible twisting in her gut that was either indigestion or the budding seeds of horrified humiliation and self-hatred. She reminded herself again that she didn't care. It didn't matter. Games were lost, and games were won.

The nagging whisper in the back of her head had cracked an eye open, just for her.

_'Most people don't lose a waiting game to the chance to whore out,'_ it told her maliciously. She moaned.

It wasn't indigestion.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

It didn't really surprise him that Jennifer was gone when he awoke. The only signs that she'd ever been there at all were the handful of coiling dark hairs littering his sheets, some with a half-inch of silvery-white root.

She also showed up for their second period class, but disappeared after lunch. That didn't surprise him either.

He wasn't worried.

His skinny, acerbic prodigy didn't take losing anything lightly. He assumed she'd come around when she came around, and no sooner.

Or challenge him again to soothe her wounded pride.

Either seemed equally possible, and equally tolerable. He knew better than to push more he already had.

The scabbing welts on his back had taught him that much. He was thankful for the sleep his exhaustion had bought him, because even the lightweight fabric of his uniform jacket felt like sandpaper on the torn skin. Just the thought of lying on his back made him feel slightly ill.

In third period, he handed in their assignment. His teacher met his eyes with a look of dark, unhappy suspicion. Kaiba assumed that had something to do with Jennifer's absence.

Her appearance and disappearance had sparked wildfire rumours across the school. Someone had spotted the tail end of a bruise snaking out from under her collar.

The thing that amused him the most was that no one had even considered the truth. The stories had built to the level of a two-week-long sleepless ninja war and re-enactments of major battles, complete with working antique firearms.

There was only one word of that he knew to be true. _'Sleepless is right.'_

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

By Wednesday, he was concerned.

His classmates were convinced that he killed her and hidden her body somewhere on the grounds of his mansion. Their teacher had started to watch him with the nervous eyes of someone weighing personal danger against the need to call the police.

Considering that he was due to release a new game in less than a week, that didn't sound particularly appealing.

She hadn't come to school, even to collect the hastily-wrapped, rather distant-looking care package that had arrived in student services the day before. The school's secretaries affirmed his suspicion that she was not answering her phone or returning their calls.

She hadn't even attempted to retrieve the bra he'd found behind his headboard.

Seto Kaiba was beginning to become annoyed.

He was not accustomed to tolerating melodrama.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

He hadn't expected to be left waiting in front of her door less than a week after seeing her. He wasn't particularly pleased to have to be there, either.

The door was firmly locked, despite the recent abuse the doorknob had sustained. It was gouged around the lock in an appalling way, and the edge of the round metal affixing it had been forcibly peeled back on one side.

He wondered vaguely when she had developed such a remarkable hatred for doors.

He wondered more clearly how large of an explosion it would cause if she discovered he'd had her key copied.

It was with that question that he hovered in front of her apartment, unwilling to be caught in the hall by an inquisitive neighbour, bit too aware of how unpredictable she could be.

He weighed the possibilities.

It was unlikely that she was sleeping, but the superintendent of the building had remarked on not seeing her enter or leave for several days. It was possible she'd never come home, but that would call question to the marks of agitation around the lock. On the note of the marks, he considered that she had been unable to get in, but that was impossible, considering that she had the original key and was unbelievably tight-fisted with her belongings.

There was only one way to check if the lock had been changed, but that lead back to the first question:

What if she was home?

Furthermore, what if she wasn't?

He tried to be indifferent, but the situation was becoming increasingly more aggravating. The obvious solution was to risk her throwing things at him rather than a possible police inquest, but neither sounded pleasant in the end.

He gambled, cursed under his breath, and slid his key into the lock.

The door opened easily enough, which answered one question.

He could see the entirety of the apartment from the front hall, which answered another.

Her bed was unmade. There were magazines on the coffee table. Her laptop was still open and running in sleep mode. Half of a lukewarm cup of whiskey and ginger ale was sitting on a wooden coaster on the counter.

A pot had boiled dry on the stove and was starting to smoke. A cup of dry noodles sat on the cutting board beside finely chopped chives and peppers. Water was running over the edge of the sink.

Jennifer Nauswell was having a fit of convulsions on the floor.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

She woke to the sensation of vomiting up hot bile and stomach acid.

She could feel the vague sensation of someone holding her hair back and her face forward. The coolness of the something pressing against her cheek and the pungent smell of cleaning fluids made her think of airplane toilets.

She hiccupped and moaned as her stomach protested. Every hollow in her skull was pouncing with pressure. She felt like day-old roadkill that had never left the tire of the truck.

When the retching had stopped, she tried to turn her head. The lights in her bathroom were like unfiltered sunlight. She groaned and tried to squeeze her eyes shut, but they felt like they had swollen to the size of balloons inside her eyesockets.

Someone familiar spoke from behind her.

"You need water."

She was pulled back from the toilet by the back of her shirt, and propped against the wall like a doll. She could feel her legs being adjusted from their splayed position. She lifted her hands to defend against the light, and had them swatted away.

The light went off with a distant _click_, and her life was suddenly less painful.

She opened her eyes again when she felt roughness on her hands. She could see someone wiping them with a towel, and realized with vague, horrible embarrassment that they been hanging in the toilet as she'd vomited. She felt soiled. She wanted to clean under her nails. She remembered that she hadn't made her bed.

She pushed her eyes up, like light switches. His grim expression demanded answers. Her voice sounded like it had been gargling whiskey and the glass it had come in.

"What the fuck are you doing in my house?"

It hurt to talk.

He was obviously livid, but he forced a glass of water on her.

It hurt to look at him.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing, Nauswell?"

It hurt to listen to him.

She tried to shove him away, but her hands were as heavy as her eyelids.

He shook her, and his voice was sandpaper on her brain. "Don't use me as an excuse for your deathwish, Nauswell." She wondered if he really sounded upset or if the putty in her brain had begun to leak from her ears.

One of those words was very familiar. As she drank, the pain started to lessen in her throat and behind her eyes. Parts of her brain began to fire up tentatively.

"Deathwish?" she asked, still marvelling at the hoarseness of her own voice. Something was off. She couldn't put her finger on it. She wondered if she'd missed school.

He was blunt with her. "Were you trying to commit suicide?"

For a second, she was flabbergasted. "What? Of course not." Suspicion started to snake through her intestines. "What day is it?"

His eyes were as luminous as ever, even in her cramped and dingy bathroom. "Wednesday."

_'Atsuko.'_

Deepening suspicion.

"Morning or night?"

An unimpressed look from him. "Night."

A thought had occurred to her. She started to feel sick. She didn't have the heart to ask him if he had dressed her. "Was the door unlocked?"

He suddenly looked oddly wary. "No." He was fidgeting with his keys. She cracked a smile that hurt her face.

"Doorknob fucked up at all?"

Kaiba looked like he was starting to catch on to her train of thought. "You didn't do that?"

She could feel it. Inside her ribcage, there was a ball of furious energy that had started to clump under her heart. She chewed the side of her tongue and lunged forward, looking in the toilet. Kaiba reached for her. She slapped his hand away.

She searched for the thin gauze of red that should have been floating along the semi-translucent yellow bile, an indigestible chemical dye too bright to be blood. It wasn't there. The water in the toilet was almost clear. She laughed, unsure if she was more angry or amazed. She wondered if he'd dyed them with Koolaide powder. _'Atsuko, you little piece of shit.'_

She turned and laid her head on the edge of the toilet seat, looking up. She didn't need to see herself reflected in his dilated pupils to know she looked awful.

She couldn't help it. Despite the pain, she laughed again.

"Can't have been Rohypnol," she told him. "Wouldn't've kept me out for more than half a day."

She didn't really know why she was smiling. She was feeling distinctly violent.

"The son of a bitch sold me horse tranquilizers."

_(You're So Spoiled!)_


	14. Chapter 14

_**Note**__: Let's get down to business. This craziness is spontaneous, and even I don't know where it's going. SHIT GONNA DOWN, BOY._

_Edit: Hahaha, oh my God, this chapter is so characteristic of their relationship, it's not even funny._

_Wait, it is funny. I didn't mean it to be, but I find the whole first part of this fucking hilarious._

_Second Edit: So I haven't updated in a while because my roommate turned twenty-one on the 21__st __(yay!) and then I just turned twenty-one on the 26__th__ (double-yay!) and then my best friend turned twenty-one yesterday (triple-yay!) and I've been all ridiculous and preoccupied with this story I've wanted to write forevah._

_So I'm like "Jesus Christ, Kiski, you can't write yet ANOTHER Kaiba/OC fiction, that would make you some kind of ridiculous I don't even have a word for." And then my brain was all like:_

"_Why do you have to write a new piece of fiction? She doesn't even have a name yet."_

_And I went "Well, hey, I want to write this, so how do I write it without being ridiculous?"_

_And my brain went "You have a perfectly good OC already."_

_And I was like "Pssh, brain, you so crazy, how on earth would Jennifer Nauswell fit into- __**oh shit damns.**__"_

_And then I realized that I've been inadvertently leading this story into that one since chapter three._

_So, uh, if you'll miss Jennifer when she's gone: Don't. Bitch ain't goin' nowheres… well, figuratively._

_Holy shit, I've been struck dead by the fanfiction sequel pandemic._

_**Summary:**__ An actually good version of the traditional 'One week at my house, one week at yours' jive assignment. Why? Because it was his fault in the first place. KaibaxOC (Be warned: They're not going to be playing nice.)_

_**Warning:**__ Probable sensuality, innuendos, and sexual tension. Oh, and psychopathic hatred._

_Edit: And crudity. Lots and lots of crudity._

_**Disclaimer: **__I didn't kill Gozaburo. Kazuki Takahashi did. _

_You're So Spoiled!_

_Chapter Fourteen_

"You need to_ sit_."

Jennifer Nauswell was having none of that.

He considered himself very lucky that she was so light, and therefore easily restrained.

With the characteristic tenacity he'd come to expect from her, she was chomping at the bit to be out in search of her dealer. What he couldn't understand was _why_.

What he understood was that she had purchased sleeping pills and had received a different, more potent kind of tranquilizer, most often used in recreationally in clubs or in higher dosages as a date rape drug. Someone had attempted to enter her home and failed. He assumed that this was her dealer, and that the second use had been his intention.

He could understand her anger. What he was having difficulty comprehending was her hateful determination to deal with the situation herself when he could lift her easily off of the floor and effectively prevent her mobilization.

He had to adjust his hold again as she squirmed and tried to pull out his knees with her questing feet. He tossed her on her bed. "Sit down, Nauswell."

She glowered at him, and stood. She started pacing.

They'd been repeating this pattern since she'd awoken. Soon, she'd make a break for the door.

He grabbed her before she could think about it. "For a prodigy, you're certainly predictable," he growled, exasperated. He tossed her on the bed again. "_Sit._"

She finally stayed, looking at him from under mussed dark hair with an expression of blank consideration. He stared back at her until she looked away. He ran a hand over his face, and reached out and grabbed her again as she tried to dart by.

He pulled her close to him, and forced her face upwards. "I have a brother who is five years younger than me, Nauswell. Do you honestly think I've never had to do this before?"

She looked embarrassed and disgruntled. "I'm not a fourteen year old boy."

He raised an eyebrow at her. "If you ate more, you would look less like one." He threw her on the bed again. "_Stay."_

She was sitting with her legs off of the edge of the bed, watching him. He glowered at her. She stuck out her tongue with an expressive look of petulance. He noticed with alarm that it looked almost bloodless. _'Anemia.'_ She started to shift forward, off of the bed. He stepped towards her, already stretched patience dissolving.

"If I have to stop you on more time," he snarled, "I will tie you to that bed with my belt. Do you understand me?"

She looked a little awestruck. "Did you actually just say that?"

He pinched his nose, and shoved her further back into the bed with a hand. She raised an eyebrow at him, and pushed his hand away with a finger.

"It's somewhat rude to touch a lady's chest without her permission, Kaiba," she teased.

He raised both eyebrows. "Yours is nothing I haven't seen or touched before," he said dryly.

She became abruptly silent and began to curl down and into herself, like a somewhat unwashed and wild-haired snail. He took the opportunity to reach into the bathroom for her cloth.

He sent a quick look back, to make sure she hadn't used the opportunity to dash again. She had not. She was still sitting with her face pressed into her knees.

He pushed a hand between them to pull her face out. She squirmed. He pressed the cloth against her face impatiently. "Hold still or clean yourself up. You look horrible."

She mewled and smacked the cloth away, trying to dive back into her fetal state. He grabbed her calf and pulled.

Her face went scarlet. She was holding still, but her eyes were looking everywhere but at him.

He knew why. He used the opportunity to wipe her face and hands before tossing the cloth in the kitchen sink.

"That doesn't go there," she muttered suddenly. She was still avoiding looking at his face.

He placed a hand on her thigh experimentally. The reaction was instantaneous. She slapped it, and then him. He dodged her hand narrowly, feeling the tip of her index finger just nick the bridge of his nose. _'A different subject, then.'_

He eyed the kitchen, determined to see something into her stomach before she starved to death in his presence. She didn't react or resist when he cleared away her unused and browning diced vegetables from the counter.

He sighed a little at her reticence.

"Tell me why you won't go to the police on this," he asked from the fridge. Most of the things he had brought home had kept well. She barely stirred, except to smile crookedly.

"He's not just a pusher."

A stir of unease poked thorns in his stomach. _'Is she sleeping with him?'_ He didn't like the idea of sharing that particular territory.

He heard her swallow, saw her lick her lips. "I'm pretty sure he's running girls for the slave trade. Tourists. Mostly white girls. I saw one passed out on his couch on Monday. I just thought she was fucking him. Now… I don't know."

Kaiba stopped to watch her. She had a strange, distant expression.

"He's been upping my dosages since I got here. Normal downers at first, like I had at home, but stronger and stronger stuff along the way. Prescription. The kind you can't just get in an afternoon with a doctor." She glanced at him and stopped smiling, looking down. "I thought he was going to try me on Rohypnol. I was waiting for him to do that before I did anything about it." She tucked her legs up again and winced. He wondered if he'd left bruises on her. "For him to give me Ketamine pills, and in such a large dosage…" she laughed a little to herself. "He must have figured that if he couldn't pick me up and they hadn't killed me outright, I'd kill myself with a drug interaction."

She looked suddenly, inescapably betrayed. She was grinding her teeth again. "I knew he was a piece of shit, but I didn't think he'd try to kill me."

She was quiet for long enough. "A drug interaction?"

Jennifer laughed a little. She was combing out her hair with her fingers. "Yeah. It probably wouldn't have been so bad, but…" a little, guilty-sounding sigh. "I took the first one Monday night. When I woke up it was dark. I thought, maybe, he'd given me something weak, that had only gotten halfway through the night. I took another one, woke up and the clock said mid-afternoon. I felt weak, dehydrated, but pretty okay. I just figured it was because I'd layered them after two weeks gone straight." She was examining her torn-up fingers. "It didn't even occur to me that it wasn't Tuesday. I thought I'd slept through school." She balled her fist, digging her nails into her palm. "If they'd just been sleeping pills, I probably wouldn't have had an attack. But Ketamine stays in the system longer. It also reacts with alcohol." She looked at him with one side of her mouth held out in an unhappy sneer. "Badly."

She sighed, looking away again. "And then you came in."

"And then I came in." He shut the fridge. He'd settled on orange juice. He didn't want to chance her throwing up any solids he fed her. He dumped out her glass on the coaster out and refilled it. "So why aren't you going to the police?"

She laughed again. "Can't prove anything. Besides, the son of a bitch almost killed me. If he'd gotten in here, he would've run me out with the rest of them. He's always complaining that foreign girls are too fat, so…" She gestured broadly to her skinny thighs. "If someone fucked off with Mokuba, would you call the police?"

He gave her a flat look, but tried to resist being sour. He reminded himself that there was no way she could know that it had happened before. Multiple times. "My brother is more capable of looking after himself than you are."

She stuck out her tongue again, took a grateful gulp of the juice, winced a little. He wondered if her throat was raw. "Remind me why that means that I should call the police. Atsuko is probably halfway to Okinawa by now, anyway. They won't go that far on account of one little not-quite-foreign, not-quite-local girl of very little significance."

"The police are less likely to get themselves killed by a bit dealer."

She gave him a narrow-eyed, crooked-mouthed look of absolute dry amusement. "Good for them." She put the empty cup on the floor and rolled it with her foot. "Kaiba, my family is terrified of me, and would rather I never came home. I brought my best friend, my only friend, to Japan three years ago, when I was first applying for overseas study. While I was at work, she was brutally raped in our apartment by someone looking for me." She leaned forward with a look of inexpressive confidence. "She killed herself. Jumped off of the balcony. She didn't die until she reached the hospital; they told me her spine had doubled up- literally, folded like origami-" she made a flat folding motion with her hand "without breaking. It was the shock that killed her." She was rolling the cup with her toes. "Essentially- I have no family, I have no friends. I'm going grey, I'm addicted to depressants, I have crippling insomnia, I forget to eat with the constancy of an fasting monk and all of the little children at my Japanese high school are now convinced that I'm an American Ninja. The closest person to me hates me so much that he came to check on me, just to make sure I hadn't killed myself and ruined his fun. My dealer just staged an unsuccessful and halfhearted kidnapping with a dangerously high chance of killing me. Even _he_ doesn't really want me. Remind me: Why shouldn't I get myself killed over a petty grudge?"

He knew he was staring at her, but a tiny, almost unnoticeable collection of tears had collected on her lower lashes. They were glittering in the light that filtered in from between the blinds.

"I don't hate you."

It was all he could think to say.

She rolled the cup too fast and far forward, and it clattered along out of reach until the weight of the handle stopped it. "Clarify to me in which situation the desire to humiliate is a result of deep affection." It was a bitter snarl, but she wasn't looking at him. "Even I'm not that maladjusted." She reached for the cup with her toes. He noticed she'd taken off the last of her chipped coral nailpolish. _"Beg for me,"_ she muttered. He could tell she was imitating him.

"Some of us… can't stand to be the only one begging."

He wasn't sure if it was the dead quiet that followed that compelled him to say it, only that it had left his mouth and sinuses feeling as raw and empty as if he'd coughed out the thick and viscous remnants of an infection. He couldn't look at her. It was impossible. He could feel her staring at him.

She punched him in the kneecap with a limp fist and dropped her hands into her lap. "_Vous trichez toujours dans ce jeu._ Why do you always do this?" Her voice was soft, but he could hear her grinding her teeth. "Every time I'm about to blow up at you, you just casually reach over and cut the wick with your fingers and now I can't be angry but I want to be and I don't know what to say to that, and well, Jesus, um…" she was covering her face and peeking at the floor through her fingers. She had started muttering in another language, too low for him to make out.

He didn't know what to do. He hadn't meant to say it, to lay out anything so clearly, but he had bumped his elbow against the caviar dish and thrown all of his cards on the table without having a clue what game they were playing anymore.

She chuckled suddenly. He looked down to see her looking at him with a lost expression of resigned bemusement, cheek in hand.

"We are, by far, the oddest pair."

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

From the length and depth of their confusion, Kaiba suspected that their classmates were planning mass ritual suicide. Over the span of a week, they had continued to panic over an unconfirmed turn of events.

They still fought about things, usually with the same intensity as before, but their arguments almost always ended the same way; with Kaiba cancelling an afternoon appointment and Jennifer scrambling to find her underwear.

They didn't talk about it, despite the constant questions on the subject. It was too awkward; somewhat taboo. Mokuba was the most difficult to shut up.

The black-haired teen was lurking in the kitchen again. His face had acquired a permanent fixture- smugness. Jennifer threw another spoon at him.

"I wish you wouldn't do that, Nauswell," he told her. "We're running out of clean spoons."

He hadn't decided if he enjoyed or dreaded when her face lit up with a variety of dirty-minded mischief that he assumed wasn't suitable for his brother's young ears. She began to prance eagerly around the island, which was always a tell-tale sign that she was going to start baiting him. _'Oh no.'_

Mokuba saw it as well. He leaned forward, obviously eager to witness the same filthy humour Jennifer saw fit to spew every time the opportunity presented itself. It only increased in inappropriateness on a level of how angry he became with her.

At this point, he had all but given up.

"Spoons? _Dirty spoons?_" She was speaking in English again. He started to see where she was wandering off to. He snatched at her as she pranced by. "_Clean spoons in the spooning for the dirty spoons- _I don't think I can be of provision to any clean spoons, honestly,_ Mister Kaiba." _She sent him a sidelong look over her shoulder. Mokuba was laughing again. "_Dirty spooning has always been my trade of choice, if you'll forgive the term."_ She was chewing her lip a little, hovering in the edge of his reach. He waited patiently. "You know what they say and it's so true: _Spooning leads to for- _wagh!_"_

She was heavier on his lap now that he'd been feeding her consistently, but she was still too light to make a struggle significant. "Regardless of your personal bias against or for spoons, Nauswell, washing the same ten spoons every day of the week is wearing on the housekeeping."

She squirmed, looking back at him. He adjusted his grip. "Spoon-washing sounds like a difficult proposition. How do you dry between them when they nest tog-"

He was starting to wonder if nonconsensually gagging his sexual companion would constitute domestic violence or sexual harassment. As it was, he spent a lot of time with his hand over her mouth.

She giggled and kissed his palm lightly.

He looked down at her, a little surprised.

Tiny moments of spontaneous affection were rare between them. They touched almost constantly, pseudo-casually, brushes on the shoulders and the back, but never anything that couldn't be misconstrued as exactly what it wasn't.

After a moment of consideration, he decided that he had enjoyed it, and pulled her further into his lap.

Mokuba was looking smug again.

Jennifer threw another spoon at him.

"_Nauswell."_

She threw up her hands.

"It was the same spoon!"

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

She was _jonesing_ again.

It was her word. Every time she started to shake, when the nausea and the swings into unreality became too bad for her to act normal, she would tell him that she was _jonesing_.

He didn't need to know what the word meant to know what it really meant. It meant that they would either fight or talk. He preferred it when they talked. When they fought, she didn't like him touching her.

He didn't like not being able to touch her. It unsettled him. Being able to touch her gave him a sense of her permanence. Otherwise, her birdlike frame and dark hair seemed fine enough to slip through an open window.

He didn't like that.

She was shuddering again, and suddenly swore, groaning. He held her arms to her sides, a little grateful.

Excessive swearing usually meant that it was a talking night.

"I usually want to punch you for being too determined to help me, you know," she told him. He laughed. She tried to smile, but she was sweating. "I always thought quitting was supposed to be hard but wonderful in the end; for me, all it means is withdrawal, week after week after week, and no sleep. Never sleep. Except…" There was the little giggle.

He cracked a smile. He couldn't help it. When she'd decided to quit, she'd told him that it was too much effort to find another dealer. He'd laughed then, too. She was funny, sometimes, when she was jonesing. She also talked too much, but she'd always talked too much. After a month and a half, he was used to that.

She'd wandered off into unreality again. He wondered what she saw there.

He let her talk.

"I always wonder what it would be like to call my family for no reason. Just… to talk. I think my mother would check herself into a psychiatric ward." She giggled a little, again. The skin on her arms was clammy. "I wonder sometimes… why I don't look like her." She looked up at him. "Blue eyes, like yours, you know. Black hair." Her light, warm green eyes were glassy. They looked catlike and reflective in the early evening light. She kept forgetting to touch up her roots. There was more than two inches, thick chunks of white showing. "She never went grey. I wonder why?"

Her fingers ghosted up, pulling at his hair, and stopped. She looked suddenly piqued, absolutely alive with interest. "What are your parents like?"

He sighed, and knocked her fingers away.

She was always too inquisitive, even when she was stable.

"I'm an orphan."

She stopped for a second, briefly shocked back into clammy stability. She looked at him with something that was wavering between bewilderment and wonder. "Really?"

He quelled his annoyance, pushed her down onto her side on the bed. "Yes."

She stared up at him from the pillow in vague and incredulous awe. "Your parents owned this place?"

Question, questions, questions, ones he couldn't believe she'd never asked before but he'd always been grateful for.

"No. My stepfather."

"Where is he?"

She was curious, honestly, openly curious, fearless of hurting him, which was one of the reasons he liked her so much, but the questions were still frankly awkward. He struggled to meet her inquisitive gaze.

"He's dead."

She frowned. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. He wasn't a good man."

A flicker of something wandered across her nose, like a fly had landed on her. She struggled to sit up. He pushed her back down and rested his hand on her waist. She was always warm there.

Her inquisitiveness had become somewhat nervous. "What happened?"

The big question. He laughed. He couldn't help it.

"I don't know."

She sat up. Her face was full of questions, overflowing onto the bedspread.

He lifted a hand to stop her. "He was killed. It is common knowledge that I did it."

She waited. It was a measured pause. She was still vague, still clammy, but obvious nervous and entranced. "Did you?"

"No."

The ultimate question.

"Who did?"

It killed him to say it.

"I don't know."

He looked out of the window at the trees. It was a question he tried not to think about, tried not to pursue. He had already gone that route, trying to discover who had stolen the last victory he had wanted, but every clue had turned into sand. The person was a nobody, ultimately forgettable, with no good reason to push a vindictive corporate giant out of a window. A person who had vanished without a trace seconds after, taking nothing, leaving the office without using the door.

It was maddening.

He looked back down at her.

"Have you ever pushed someone out of a window?" he asked, feeling a breeze of her whimsical madness.

Her eyes were huge. "I fell out of a window once."

He laughed.

He just couldn't help it.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

He wasn't surprised to find her gone in the morning. She usually went home to get things before school; even on weekends. Sober, she was prone to forgetting things. She had said it was 'the plight of the prodigy'.

He believed her.

He ate breakfast with his still irrepressibly smug brother. His public virtual reality console was nearly flawless for its release. Jennifer had finally agreed to let him handle Atsuko, and under his pressure, the police had a strong lead- ironically, in Okinawa.

He was having a good day.

By lunchtime, he began to be slightly concerned. For once, she hadn't left her underwear under his bed.

By dinner, he was alarmed.

At six-fifteen, he arrived at her apartment. The doorknob was still scuffed, but no more scuffed than before. The lock was still the same. He opened it.

The futon was gone. So was the coffee table.

There were no mugs or half-chopped vegetables on the counter.

The apartment was empty.

Jennifer Nauswell was gone.

_(You're So Spoiled!)_

_Note: Aaand… drumroll… that is the last chapter of YSS! But don't kill me! Please- I promised more, and there will be more. Keep an eye out for __**No Evidence Available**__. I'll do my best to make you shit your pants with joy, I swear to God!_


End file.
